It is a question of how we use new media, new work-study operations, using the city as classroom or the environment as classroom. All of these come to mind. This is off the top of my head but these are the kinds of areas where an NIE could make an enormous differance over a period of time by focusing attention and research energies. Mr. KEMP. Dr. Bailey, you have written extensively on regional labs. How do you see their relationship with NIE for the future?

Dr. BAILEY. I would assume that the regional laboratories in some form or other would continue and that part of the NIE responsibility would be to coordinate the activities of the separate laboratories and be the major administrative funding act for research carried on by the individual labs. The labs would then, like R. & D. centers, be places, if you want, retaining research activities.

The NIE itself, I think, would have to have some inhouse research. But its greatest functions would be to try to rationalize and bring greater cohesion to what is going on in universities and in R. & D. centers, and to provide some kind of incentives for far greater diffusion activities than the labs have been able to conduct to date. Mr. KEMP. Thank you.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Mr. Reid.

Mr. REID. First, Dr. Bailey, let me welcome you here most warmly. I am delighted you can be here representing both the board of regents and Syracuse University Research Corp.

Let me ask a few general questions. I take it that you would subscribe to the proposition that we need to put much greater emphasis and resources into preschool combined with nutrition and health which is part of separate legislation that the Chairman and I are working on combining national day-care centers and probably Head Start.

But the first 4 years of a child's life may be the key to the learning process. One of the deficiencies is lack of emphasis on preschool. Would your research confirm that?

Dr. BAILEY. As to my first priority, how do you teach poor kids, again I don't think you can answer that question unless we zero in on preschool years.

It may have to do with prenatal diet, with diet of young people, with day-care center activity, with operation Head Start, the kinds of things with bilingual activities before school such as is being carried on now in the Austin laboratory, Ben Bloom's work seems to me as well as the work of Piaget, seem to me to add up to a very strong emphasis on the preschool years as the key to later learning and later self-sufficiency in the educational world.

Mr. REID. What do you think you learned or did not know or suspicions you had confirmed through the regional educational laboratories?

What kind of research should be initiated at the Federal level in this institute?

Dr. BAILEY. I think we have learned some things both positive and negative. Positively there are a lot of things going on in the laboratory now that are very exciting, and the payoff, I think, are nearby. With a real diffusion effort you could take some of the things that have been developed and make a difference in a large part of the Nation's education.

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I think, on the negative side that if the laboratories were starting over again, were adequately funded, and I have to underscore that, I think they might well have brought a lot more scholarship from different areas of expertise. That is, they might have defined tasks in such a way that they could have brought task forces together upon which would sit physiologists, nutritionists, child experts, reading experts and so on.

I think there has been a slight tendency in the laboratory to put too much weight on the reasonably thin resources of education with a capital E.

I think the trick in the field of educational R. & D. is to do for this field what was so magnificiently successful in the moon shot which is to identify goals and then to pull together talent from a dozen or a hundred different professions and focus that talent upon specific problems.

Mr. REID. I am sure that makes great sense and in a way you are talking about funding and methodology. Let me go behind that to one or two concepts. You talked about students being bored, you talked about structure, we have talked a little bit about the preschool area. What are your thoughts about compensatory education, what are your thoughts about the children, 7 million of them, who come from homes where they don't have two parents, and in some cases don't have one parent? What do you think are some of the things that we should be testing in this research area that would make education more relevant, that would bring children along in a more hopeful way?

What are some of the guideposts and hopeful signs that you have taken-that you have seen to reach the child? What would you guess, and I am asking you to speculate, are some of the things we are doing badly? For example, Sesame Street obviously seems to be striking a fairly responsive chord.

It is quite clear if you look at our classrooms across New York State and indeed across the country that many children are falling behind at many grade levels, never to catch up.

What are some of the major things we should be thinking about and some of the things that should be broken out in a surge that would help?

Dr. BAILEY. Congressman, this is a bigger question than I am sure I can handle in this setting. It needs enormous thought and I would hope that an NIE function would be to address itself to the question you have raised.

It is hard to think of a more important one. I can make one or two quick comments and that is all. First, the Southwest Regional Laboratory in Englewood, Calif., has as you probably know put together what they call a first year communication skills program which they have addressed particularly to minority groups in the Los Angeles

area.

I would commend this program to this committee. I have some information here about it and you can get further information from the U.S. Office of Education. But what they are doing seems to me to be very hopeful.

They are taking a problem like the reading problem and breaking it down into modular units, developing kits of teaching materials, ways of learning, ways of training leaders, ways of tutoring tutors, and this

is a program which, if substantial funds are behind it, I think would make a difference in our State as well as others.

I would like to see further emphasis upon that kind of approach to the early years in the field of compensatory education.

I think it very possible that we may have to move in the next few years to some kind of voucher system and I mean this not in the sense Sandy Jencks and others at Harvard have been using it, but a way of saying to parents, if the existing school system leaves your child behind, then here is a voucher that will enable you to take that child for certain periods of the day and put that child in the hands of specialists in the areas of his deficiency, and I think some kind of movement of that sort may be necessary.

I can't speculate on how that would look in detail but I think it intolerable to leave the children of our State, let alone the other States of the Union, in the condition they are left in with 25 percent of the kids in the cities and 46 percent in New York City for below grade level.

I don't speak, incidentally, Mr. Congressman, for the board of regents. I am simply identifying that as a reason for my concern. They speak for themselves in an august way. I am deeply concerned with the problems which are presented to us monthly of the kind we are just discussing.

Mr. REID. Thank you very much. That is very helpful.
Mr. BRADEMAS. Mr. Landgrebe.

Mr. LANDGREBE. Dr. Bailey, I want to pose a question that I asked the other day. We talk about teaching methods and the lack of interest of the students. Do you conceive this new Institute perhaps addressing itself to the products of the school, Dr. Moynihan mentioned that we have some 20,000 educational systems in the country and he does not propose to change that, but shouldn't there be a common goal? Other than just getting good grades, shouldn't we have a national standard or something that we are trying to achieve, a goal in citizenship and integrity and morals and something of this kind for the students that we are teaching other than just A-B-C grades so to speak?

Can you conceive this Institute addressing itself to the product, the kind of citizens that we want to produce from our schools, the products of these schools?

Dr. BAILEY. Mr. Congressman, I hope that an organization like the National Institute of Education would address itself to this kind of question and would fund experimental work in research and colloquies that would address themselves to this kind of question.

I say that at the same time I have very substantial reservations: about the notion that there are some kinds of moral absolutes that ought to be handed down from the Federal Government and that ought to be taught in every school system in the country.

I find myself quite restive with that notion and if I could simply explain myself, I am philosophically a great believer in pluralism, that is, in a number of different kinds of ways of living and of looking at life.

Obviously there has got to be enough agreement on basic and moral value questions so this Nation can be fundamentally one.

Beyond that I frankly like the notion of some school districts having boards of education that are quite conservatively oriented, other school

districts having boards of education that are quite liberally oriented, and some boards of education that support the teaching of sex in family living courses, and others that feel that in terms of their culture, that is going too far too fast. I think we need an enormous amount of new energy imposed on the questions of values and the unfolding pluralism of our society.

I would be very reluctant to have the National Institute of Education come up with authoritative doctrine in this field. Am I making a distinction that is nonsensical? I hope not.

Mr. LANDGREBE. I appreciate very much your answer. I, like many folks, went to a smaller school and almost next door to that school was a church. Now we have huge schools with thousands of students. Who shall set the standards? There are a great deal of, a great many problems in our country and they are caused by people and their thinking. While we must permit diversity of thinking and I still insist that someplace somewhere there ought to be in the modern society guidelines for the behavior of people.

Shouldn't a free society have some sort of a target, some sort of a dream that we would like for our people to achieve to be trained and educated for, that they would have respect for other people and would tend to be a happier race?

What is education all about beyond just then being able to earn more money and be a more substantial taxpayer?

I don't want to argue and debate this. This will be my last statement. If you wish to comment further, fine, if not that is up to you.

Dr. BAILEY. I appreciate your position and I have, I guess, quite a simple answer to what is a complex question. If you are talking about ultimate goals of education, in our society.

Mr. LANDGREBE. Yes, why education?

Dr. BAILEY. Education because ultimately we want to produce generations of human beings to respect others and who themselves can have a joyful life.

Mr. LANDGREBE. Thank you.

Mr. BREDAMAS. Thank you, Dr. Bailey, very much indeed. We are grateful for your having come and we hope you will let us be in touch with you as we go into the legislation.

Dr. BAILEY. Thank you, Mr. Brademas.

Mr. BRADEMAS. Our next witness is Dr. Anthony Oettinger, professor of linguistics, Harvard University, and research associate on program on technology and society, Harvard University and a widely recognized authority on educational technology.

We are very pleased to have you Dr. Oettinger. If you could try, sir, to make the main points that you have set forth in your paper, then the members of our subcommittee would like to put some questions to you.

(The document referred to follows:)

PREPARED STATEMENT OF ANTHONY G. OTTINGER, PROFESSOR OF LINGUISTICS, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Mr. Chairman, may I first thank you for inviting me to appear before your committee. I appreciate this opportunity to express myself on behalf of the proposal to establish a National Institute of Education. This is a matter in which I am deeply interested as a citizen with young children in a public school, as a college teacher and as a scholar deeply involved in studying and experimenting

with the processes and the technologies of learning and education. I should add that the views I am about to express do not necessarily reflect the official views either of Harvard University, where I am a professor and a research associate to the Program on Technology and Society, or of the National Academy of Sciences, where I am Chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Board.

The statement in Section 2 of the bill of a requirement for "far more dependable knowledge about the processes of learning and education than now exists or can be expected from present research and experimentation in this field" is a most welcome recognition of a fact that has too long been ignored. In the course of the study of the impact of educational technology on the schools which I've reported in my book "Run, Computer, Run", I grew critical of the premature application of processes and devices judged by some to be important additions to current practice on the basis of what I considered to be the flimsiest evidence. I concluded that recent attempts to introduce technological change into formal education have revealed how profoundly ignorant we still are.

I therefore see the establishment of a National Institute of Education as a necessary, constructive and timely action. I applaud the intent of the bill and I am favorably impressed by the analysis embodied in the Preliminary Plan for the proposed institute. This latter impression is particularly pleasing to me, since it enables me to take some pried in the fact that Dr. Levien, the study director, was my student back in 1962. The comments and criticisms I am about to state are therefore offered in the spirit of enhancing the effectiveness of a proposal I see as fundamentally sound and in the national interest.

I should like first to express my agreement with an observation, made in the Preliminary Plan, which I believe should remain high in the consciousness of everyone concerned with the establishment and the critical initial stages of development of the NIE. On page 18, the Plan points out that "the nature of the behavioral and social sciences and educational research and development is sufficiently different from that of 'hard science' activities that considerable care must be exercised in translating the lessons learned in the management of one to the other." I think that many of the absurdities I have noted in Run, Compuuter, Run are a consequence of the mindless parrotting in realms like education of techniques and attitudes that have had spectacular but nonetheless limited successes in physical sciences, their applications, and their management. One consequence has been a sharp, but altogether undeserved, loss of faith in reason. As Caryl Haskins points out in a recent report 3 "a progressively orthodox reliance on the sufficiency of reason to solve all of man's relationships with the world... may have laid the ground in some measure for the considerable loss of faith in reason itself that threatens our own age. .. As Medawar has also noted, we live in an age more than touched by the damaging philosophy that reason itself not only is not sufficient for us; it is no longer necessary for us. That curious inversion can exert a considerable adverse influence, not only on science, but on all rational thinking." The statement in the preliminary plan wisely acknowledges the necessity of reason but also the fact that reason, particularly as applied through techniques appropriate to the "hard sciences", is not sufficient. One clear consequence is that those concerned with the development of the new institution must be men of strong faith in reason who are also willing to strike out into uncharted territory unhampered by prevailing orthodoxies.

The tone of the Preliminary Plan is encouraging in this respect. I applaud the statement, on page 23, that "the phrase 'education of Americans' has been chosen in preference to 'American education' in order to emphasize that education in all settings, both within schools and outside of thtem, and of all Americans, before, during, and after the traditional school ages, should be within the scope of interest of the NIE." The main thread of my criticism will be that a later statement on page 23, to the effect that "the NIE should have a broad enough charter to enable it to follow the thread of an educational problem across the educational fabric", does not end with the additional phrase "and beyond". Let me pick up this thread with the language "collect and disseminate the findings of educational research" in Section 4 of the bill (page 3, lines 3-4). The

1 Oettinger, A. G., Run, Computer, Run: The Mythology of Educational Innovation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1969.

Levien, R. E. (Study Director), National Institute of Education: Preliminary Plan for the Proposed Institute, The RAND Corporation, Washington, D.C., December 15. 1970. 3 Haskins, C., Report of the President, 1969-1970, Carnegie Institution of Washington. Haskins, page 17.