Council of Educational Advisors issue an annual report on the state of educa tion and its progress during the previous year.

And that this report be submitted to a joint committee of the Congress, to be established along the lines of the Joint Committee on the Economic Report. This structure appealed to us-the committee whose membership I listed above-more than ten years ago, and it appeals to me still.

It would provide the proper Presidential support, and the proper Congressional review, of the workings of the proposed National Institute of Education.

I strongly recommend further consideration of this proposal by your Subcommittee, and by the Congress and the Administration.

3. REAFFIRMATION OF FAITH IN THE AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL SYSTEM

The past five years have seen a rising chorus of complaint about the American educational system. The critics are numerous, well-intentioned, articulate, and zealous. Much of their work has been of the greatest value in stimulating our adult population, so many years removed from the classroom, to look at our school practices with fresh eyes. And the results are clear: a fresh approach to educational practice is evident, and new methods such as the "open classroom," even the open school, programmed learning, new systems of teaching reading, new multi-media instructional systems, Sesame Street, and many other forward steps are being taken.

Perhaps the critics have, in totality, been overzealous. The broad educational picture in the United States, seen from proper perspective, is not as dismal as one would gather from the recent popular literature on this subject.

The fact remains that of all the major nations of the world, our educational system provides more learning to a greater proportion of its citizens than any other. Despite the deficiencies of our schools and colleges--and these we must seek to overcome our system is the best and most broadly based in the world. We are all distressed, for example, by the violence in our schools and colleges. And many consider this an "educational" problem.

Yet the critics who bring this to our attention-and speak of favorable learning situations in other nations-find it convenient to ignore the fact that we have seen similar violence among young people in many other nations in recent years— nations with such diverse educational, political, and economic systems as Japan, Egypt, Mexico, France, China, Germany, and other countries.

This phenomenon of violence and lawlessness among the young cannot, therefore, be attributed to specific features of the American educational system.

We also hear much about the conservation among the schools, and their resistance to innovation. It is true we have a large and somewhat inflexible school system. It does take years or decades to achieve educational change. Yet those who urge rapidity or change might do well to pause and reflect upon the many new educational proposals advanced during the past decades-many now obvious, in hindsight, as patently absurd. Would they have wished these to have been rapidly instituted in the schools?

The balance between preservation of the traditional and valuable, and acceptance of the new and promising, is not all one-sided. Everything old is not bad, and everything new is not good.

Most of our judgment on these matters must depend on the collective experi ence and knowledge of those on the firing line, the teachers and administrators in our schools. There are millions of these working professionals in the schools now, and tens of millions have served in the past recent decades. A high proportion are dedicated professional men and women whose stature and importance have never been recognized fully in American society. Most of them are not working in education for money or self-aggrandizement, but because they love education. Many work long hours, often under trying conditions, in one of our noblest professions.

How shall we value their collective experience and judgement?

Is it not true that these teachers and administrators have, in fact, provided the major actual "evaluation laboratory" for educational practice?

In our time of rapid communication, can it be maintained that they will be unwilling to adopt efficient and sensible innovation? I do not think so.

Two telling points in this connection were made earlier in testimony before this Subcommittee by Dr. Gideonse that do bear repeating.

First, he noted that educational research-as distinguished from research in the physical, natural, or biological sciences-is inseparably connected to questions of human choice and value. For progress here, then, we must depend

on the collective values and good sense and judgment of the practitioners of education, the teachers and administrators in the schools.

Second, Dr. Gideonse noted the dangers of the concept of a "delivery system" in which separated experimenters or academic experts, removed from the schools, would research and develop new methods of instruction that would then be "handed down” to the practitioners in a one-way flow. This system will not be successful.

Certainly educators "will tend to resist the low status implications of being on the receiving end of the system; academics and scientists in turn will tend to find confirmed their latent suspicions concerning the professional motives and competencies of the 'natives they have come to save'."

I think Dr. Gideonse's testimony bears careful study as the Institute is formed. An important place-an equal place to all other disciplines-must be afforded the working teachers and administrators within the Institute. Otherwise it is unlikely to become more than another remote, uninfluential center for behavioral and social psychologists. In a sense, the teachers and administrators in our schools must be a central, decision-making part of the Institute.

4. IMPORTANT ROLE OF THE EDUCATIONAL MATERIALS PRODUCING INDUSTRY

Many witnesses before this Subcommittee, and other commentators on education, have referred to research and development in other fields-space, transportation, the health fields, and so on.

We have all heard a good many times of the disparity between the relative research funds spent in these fields, and in education. And from these data, comparisons are drawn about progress and achievement, comparisons that are disparaging to education, but made with the best of motives: namely, to improve the funding of educational research.

Yet few of these commentators have taken the two necessary additional steps in this analogy. First, it must never be forgotten that progress in transportation, space, the health fields, and every other example that can be cited favorably, has not been achieved without the vital participation of private industry.

Whether it is construction of new aircraft, space vehicle components, research on drugs by the pharmaceutical companies, fertilizers and pesticides in agriculture, or whatever-a substantial part of the progress of recent decades in these so-called "more successful" fields has been due to private enterprise companies, often working together with Government agencies, universities and research laboratories.

In American education, the significant private companies are the producers of educational materials-textbooks and reference books, motion pictures and other audio-visual devices, and so on.

This is one further step in the analogy that, I believe, must be made if the Institute is to succeed. For the very same reasons that it is not, in general, feasible or appropriate for Government agencies to build airplanes, I believe it would not be appropriate or feasible for the Institute to function without close and harmonious relations with the private companies that today provide educational materials to the schools.

There are opportunities for flexibility, freedom, and achievement that are available in our society only to private companies. Such has been the successful pattern in these other oft-cited fields. So should it be also for the Institute.

...

I note that the proposed legislation, H.R. 33, does in fact contain this provision in Section 4, that "The Secretary, through the Institute, shall conduct educational research . . . assist and foster such research, collection, dissemination, or training through grants, or technical assistance to, or jointly financed cooperative arrangements with, public or private organizations, institutions, agencies, or individuals . . ." (emphasis added).

I stress this point because this is the second step in the extended analogy— it is a simple, indisputable fact that the bulk of current educational development is actually a matter undertaken today by private industry.

The educational materials you and I used in school, and those by our children today, come from private companies. These are not inferior materials, in general. They are produced by professional people, subject to keen competition in school adoption and purchase, and refined through many years of actual use in the schools.

I reject utterly the notion that most of our textbooks, films, and other educational materials are of poor quality. The process by which they are made and

selected is, I believe, more valid than the testing procedures now available in the current "state of the art" in educational psychology.

Thousands of workers in the textbook and reference book publishing houses, audio-visual companies, and other educational materials producing organizations, including specialists from all fields, work very hard to produce the best possible materials. Then, millions of teachers and school administrators select among the broad range of offerings. In most cases poor materials are soon rejected.

The testing procedures that some wish to apply are themselves, in fact, produced by the same procedures as the educational materials. It is an error in logic to assume that the tests are somehow superior to the materials.

Thus, we cannot agree with the much-publicized reasoning of Dr. Komoski, and its implications that our students are receiving inferior educational materials. It may be true that they are receiving "poorly tested" materials—but this is because the tests are poor, not the materials!

Mostly, such tests presuppose the fixing of carefully defined "behavioral" or other objectives, sometimes called "learning outcomes."

In many cases, these must be drawn too narrowly for acceptance by most educators. Certainly we can specify if we wish that a geography student should be able to list the names of the major rivers in America.

But is such a major goal of instruction?

Do we not wish to teach our students a love of learning, and teach them also the ability to learn by themselves?

In particular, this last and most important goal of education, that the pupil learn to learn by himself, is generally overlooked by the proponents of tightly drawn behavioral learning tests.

Let me return to the role of the publisher in development and innovation, both of materials and tests. This becomes apparent only after some reflection. Maerials produced by university and research center groups have not, in general, been shown to be superior in the classroom. If so, our industry would have disappeared some years ago. The reason why it has not is that we often apply the similar procedures, care, research (when it is valid), and use the same type of specialists in all fields, as the non-profit organizations!

Let me give some examples taken from the experience of our companies. In the early 1960's, when the principles of programmed learning were exciting wide interest, at Britannica we began a major effort in this field.

At first we thought the materials would be used in teaching machines, and the program was called TEMAC, an acronym for "Teaching Machine." The first quick experiments showed that the machines did not work well, so we abandoned them, and produced the materials in book form.

The Encyclopedia Britannica Press released almost a whole high school mathematics curriculum in this form-and this was the first major programmed learning effort to be published. Its existence and success then spurred similar programmed learning work in other fields, and by other companies.

At about the same time, we began to produce the first Visual Audio Lingual foreign languages courses-that included film, audiotapes, and traditional and programmed textbooks.

We found effective ways to teach Spanish and French to the American pupil with these newer media. Within a short time, as is natural and desirable, other publishers began adding these new media to their foreign language courses! And then we went back to refine our materials further. And we went on to do a similar Latin course. This is the process that leads to excellence in educational materials, as in other activities in our society.

In the mid-1960's, we found a distinguished educator, Dr. R. Van Allen, with a new method for teaching reading, called the "language experience" approach. Here, the pre-reading child's own spoken language is used as the vehicle to start him reading.

Language Experiences in Reading began to be published about 1966. Attention turned to the disadvantaged child from the ghetto-a child often apathetic, sluggish, hostile, difficult to reach in school.

We produced a series of remarkable films without narration, called Magic Moments, to excite this apathetic or wary and suspicious child to communicatethe start of the reading process in this "language experience" method.

This year, for the first time, a special pre-convention institute on the language experience method was held at the International Reading Association Convention, and now we notice other publishers using this phrase, and aspects of the method, in their approach to reading education.

We are proud of these new programs, for these are the ones that have succeeded.

We are proud of the risks we took. Of course, not all of our materials have been so successful-but we learned quickly of those which were inefficient and ineffective in education. Of course, we learned. Our own testing in the field, done with teachers and former teachers, told us.

Such is progress in commercial educational materials production. Profits are desired. Innovations are attempted. Failure is rejected, and success is pursued, copied, and eventually improved.

This is the process that has worked best in all other aspects of our society. It is the process that the proposed National Institute of Education should seek to include in its functioning. Unless it does, and includes therein similar working collaboration with private industry as is encountered in the aerospace, health, and other fields, this Institute will never achieve its potential effectiveness.

5. TELEVISION AND LEARNING

In his testimony before this Subcommittee in February of this year, Professor Moynihan noted that the President had proposed that the National Institute of Education concentrate on several topics: new measurements of achievement, compensatory education for the disadvantaged and handicapped, reading education, experimental schools, the learning process and television.

The last is of particular concern to me, because the Encyclopaedia Britannica Educational Corporation is today-and has been, in the past, through the former Encyclopaedia Britannica Films-the foremost producer-distributor of educa tional classroom motion pictures.

We were the first, through the former ERPI Films on which this company is based, to produce motion pictures in sound for classroom education, and we try to make the best such films today. But we are not alone in this field-and we salute those in other similar companies who prepare such materials.

Coronet, McGraw Hill, Bailey-Film Associates, the Learning Corporation, and many other companies-too many to list here also produce films of distinction for use in the classroom.

Such, in fact, was the dream of Thomas Alva Edison, George Eastman, and other pioneers in the motion picture industry: to use this medium in education. Such also was the dream of those in the early stages of television. Today we have two large, widespread systems to provide education via the moving image and spoken word to the pupil at school: the educational film industry is one and instructional television the other.

It seems a great waste of our resources that these similar movements have not come together. Large amounts of federal and foundation funds are spent to finance television production of materials that are, in intention, similar or identical to those already produced by the educational film companies.

Above all, television-whether broadcast, cable, or closed-circuit-has a mechanism to deliver the educational film to the pupil.

The educational film companies have a vast repository of material that could so be effectively used.

One specific suggestion, then, for the Institute might be an examination of this question. Substantial savings and improved educational effectiveness could be expected to result.

6. SUMMARY

(1) We enthusiastically endorse the idea of the proposed National Institute of Education, and reject the insinuation that this Institute will be a vehicle to reduce federal spending for education.

(2) We suggest the establishment of a "President's Council of Educational Advisors," modeled after the existing Council of Economic Advisors, which would issue annual reports on the state of education and educational progress in the United States to a joint committee of the Congress, to be established as is the Joint Committee on the Economic Report.

(3) We praise the basic validity of the American educational system and the professionalism and talent of its working practitioners, the teachers and administrators. With scholarly leadership based on research, we believe the system is sufficiently flexible to accept change, and has enough resistance to innovation to avoid temporary fads. Since the teachers and administrators themselves are responsible for "evaluation" of education materials, it is recommended that they be accorded a role in the proposed Institute, along with other professionals.

(4) The role of commercial producers of educational materials-textbooks, reference books, motion pictures, filmstrips, et cetera-as the de facto researchers and developers of new educational materials should not be overlooked.

The analogy with the research and development success in the aerospace, health, and other industries to education should be carried through to note that in these other cases, collaboration with private industry has been an essential feature of progress.

We recommend that the Institute be established to conduct similar collaborative work with private commercial educational materials producers, for we believe our American textbooks, reference books, and educational films and filmstrips, are in the main, of high quality.

(5) We suggest that the Institute explore the wasteful duplication presently in effect between the educational television and educational film organizations. Mr. PARTON. I will excerpt some of Senator Benton's remarks at this time.

First, let me begin by heartily commending the wisdom and thoroughness of the Subcommittee in holding hearings on this subject in Chicago. For this city is truly the center of a major segment of the industry that produces and distributes the educational materials used by the American child in school, and his teacher.

Many of the foremost textbook companies, the leading producer-distributors of educational classroom films and filmstrips, distinguished reference book companies, important private proprietary and correspondence schools, manufacturers of "hardware" such as motion picture projectors and educational television equipment-all are located within the Greater Chicago region to such an extent of educational produce diversity and quantity and of depth of usage in the schools that this area probably rightly considers itself the "capital" of educational materials production in the United States."

At the end of his statement he summarizes, briefly, five major conclusions. I would like to read that summary and depart from the brevity of it in the one instance, to read the whole recommendation.

(1) We enthusiastically endorse the idea of the proposed National Institute of Education, and reject the insinuation that the Institute will be a vehicle to reduce federal spending for education.

(2) We suggest the establishment of a "President's Council of Educational Advisors," modeled after the existing Council of Economic Advisors, which would issue annual reports on the state of education and educational progress in the United States to a joint committee of the Congress, to be established as is the Joint Committee on the Economic Report.

(3) We praise the basic validity of the American educational system and the professionalism and talent of its working practitioners, the teachers and administrators. With scholarly leadership based on research, we believe the system is sufficiently flexible to accept change, and has enough resistance to innovation to avoid temporary fads.

Since the teachers and administrators themselves are responsible for "evaluation" of education materials, it is recommended that they be accorded a role in the proposed Institute, along with other professionals.

(4) The role of commercial producers of educational materials-textbooks, reference books, motion pictures, filmstrips, et cetera-as the de facto researchers and developers of new educational materials should not be overlooked. The analogy with the research and development success in the aerospace, health, and other industries to education should be carried through to note that in these other cases, collaboration with private industry has been an essential feature of progress.

We recommend that the Institute be established to conduct similar collaborative work with private commercial educational materials producers, for we believe our American textbooks, reference books, and educational films and filmstrips are, in the main, of high quality.

(5) We suggest that the Institute explore the wasteful duplication presently in effect between the educational television and educational film organizaions." That is the end of Senator Benton's testimony. With your permission, sir, I would like to add a few extemporaneous comments of my own, and then would be delighted to respond to questions.

I would first observe it has been fashionable in the recent decade to talk about the knowledge industry and the implication has been that it is comparable to the steel or automobile or other big industries.