(13) It can provide a free "always open" consultant research service component for all developmental school programs. The creativity of program designers in schools will be balanced by the supportive educational data generated and situationalized by the Institute.

(14) It can review the vast array of non-school inputs to the learning process. It can collect and massage data on the effects and effectiveness of things such as media, nutrition, drugs, family background, and environments on learning.

(15) It can produce interesting and informative presentations of research findings in multiple forms-movies, videotapes, slide tapes, publications—which can be used by vacious publics for both training and awareness purposes. It can also catalogue, store and distribute these materials.

These are some of the services to educators, citizens and students which a National Institute of Education can provide. It can capitalize on the more specialized work of the Regional Labs and on the disparate works in universities. Equally important, it can help schools to adapt to the kind of research and development models now essential in science and industry-models which have de signed, manufactured, and tested the most complex aerial weapons system known to man only five years after its conception; enabled scientists to wipe out polio and childhood diseases; and corrected a faulty radar system within two hours by a team of men some of whom were in Cambridge, Massachusetts, some of whom were at Cape Kennedy in Florida, and some of whom were ten miles from the moon.

These kinds of scientific capabilities must be used to solve other problems undeniably important to the survival of our country. In defense we spend ten percent of our budget on research. In education we spend less than one half of one percent.

The choice is ours. Either continue the cosmetic approach to solving educa tional problems by dabbling with little bottles of salves and lotions from our personal vanity, or plan future change by combining individual creativity with team scientific methods based on a reservoir of accumulated knowledge. The National Institute gives us, for the first time, an opportunity to design techniques, experiences, programs and schools which will make future education as remarkable and effective, as the twentieth century progress already demonstrated in medicine, mobility, management and media. That we have policemen in our schools is educational hypocrisy. Accepting policemen in our schools, as the way it must be, would be a national disgrace. How do children really learn in school is the question. We honestly now have little idea. Can we do better?

The National Institute of Education provides a hope that we can accomplish at least some of the multiple agendas that press in on us so urgently. But that hope is much less than certain. Will we be able to create an institute with sufficient independence and freedom to sponsor unpopular research or to follow a program of research long enough to really gain a perspective on its long range potential. Remember the first time the horse and steam engine ran a race. The horse won. We have yet to identify even the entries in our race to determine the successful future of education.

STATEMENT OF DR. DWIGHT ALLEN, DEAN OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS

Dr. ALLEN. I begin with the assumption that education is getting unsatisfactory. There are not villains to be found, or we would have found them and got on with the job.

I see educational professions devoting their lives to education of children but having lost sight of their objectives to the sense they don't know how to go about it.

The definition of a fanatic is a man who having lost sight of objectives, redoubles his efforts. I think we have a lot of fanatics in the business of education and also in the business of changing education.

Most teachers and administrators are more effective in the system than the system allows them to be. They have given up in terms of having any kind of basic impact on the system.

It takes all of your concerted effort just to stay afloat if you are trying to challenge any of the basic assumptions.

For example, in the Bureau of Educational Professional Development, Don Davies is doing an excellent job of trying to find a way out of the morass of the issue of career training but being checkmated at every point not because again there are people who are trying to do it in but because no one has a perspective on what is going on.

I guess if I were to sum up my feeling about NIE in one word it would be alternatives. That we perhaps need alternate types of edu cation more than anything else.

I would agree that it is difficult in our pluralistic society to gain consensus on almost anything. One of the dangers I see is polarization of our society at present. The demand for consensus of education 1 think will further cut this polarization or further exacerbate the polarization.

We need to find a means to develop educational alternatives that do not require consensus. Let me give a couple of examples. Right now I consider our entire educational system, public and private, a monolithic system.

It proceeds from the assumptions of didactic instructions. It proceeds from assumptions that teachers know and kids don't. Assumptions that may have been true years ago but hardly true now when students have access to a wide variety to information outside of school.

The assumption that you have to go to school to learn. The assumption that schools teach the truth. If you look at it, the local school board does not have much control over the school.

The State controls certification. Colleges control college entrance requirements. The local school board is often left with choices of whether to have a course in photography or sex education. The image is local control of schools. I think so long as these myths surround the practice of education, we are not going to be able to find levers of appropriate change and here I think is where the National Institute of Education comes in. If indeed the National Institute of Education turns out only to research present practice, I think it will fail.

The single most important mechanism that has to be put into it is a mechanism to assure that we search for new alternatives and not simply refine old ones. I think that the crucial problems of education all bear on this. We don't have basic means of change strategies in education.

The change strategies that we have presume that someone controls education. I don't think there is a control of education. Education is a network and not a system.

It is a delicate balance of vested interests and to change education somehow you have to get at these vested interests. As the earlier witnesses have testified, we have not found out how to incorporate technological potential in instructions.

We have to find a way to overcome vested interests. Right now curriculum decisions in school are in the hands of the people who are affected by those decisions.

It is hardly possible to expect an English professor to vote to discontinue freshman English when the support of his graduate program depends upon teaching freshman English.

It is hardly possible that you are going to get credentialed teachers, to have perspective in education of student-teachers when that credential system protects their vested interest.

I think it is irony that a doctor can see a student alone in his office in the medical building but is prohibited by law from taking charge or seeing a student alone in school in an instructional situation unless he has a credential.

We need to find ways to bring the school closer to the community and bring the community closer to the school to tear down the walls between school and community. I would like to examine the basic assumption that schools should start at 8 and end at 3.

Maybe it should start at 6 or 7 in the morning and go to 10 and 11 at night. Maybe it should continue all year with teachers coming and going, the community coming and going. Why does Johnny go to school during the day and his mother go to school at night in adult education class?

Maybe having Susie go to sewing class with mother would be a fine thing in adult education. These are the kinds of things we need to explore. We have to link the levels of education together and right now there are separate divisions of elementary education, secondary education, and higher education, as if students can be compartmentalized in these three groups.

I see education as a continuous process.

The metamorphisis that we expect of students as they go from one level to another are some of the things that need to be investigated.

In terms of the process of the institute itself, autonomy, of course, is going to be an issue on control. I think the proposal to have it a separate agency within HEW is an appropriate one. The success or failure of that, however, will be more a result of the personalities and implementations of the legislation rather than the theoretical placement of the agency.

One of the problems in NIE that they will have, which is much more severe than in NSF, is the fact that everyone in the public is an expert on education, whereas in NSF, NSF could do all sorts of things and general public has no notion of how to respond to it.

In the National Institute of Education, everyone is an expert and everyone will respond. Somehow I think we have to find a way to isolate NIE sufficiently from day-to-day responses of people so that we can get some assurance of long range continuity, get some assurance that diverse programs can be funded and that we don't create the kind of commission mechanism that reduces everything to the lowest common denominator.

Any time you get a battle of views that have to gain consensus, you get the lowest common denominator.

I would rather see diverse alternatives simultaneously invested so that unpopular viewpoints could be encouraged. Money is not the prime problem in education. I think vision is the problem.

One of the major efforts of NIE would be to investigate ways in which major resources can be reoriented within the educational establishment. That programmatic evaluation must be a major thrust.

Someone ought to be looking at development of real time evaluation procedures so we can make some decisions about education in the context of educational experiment. I think it is the classical experi

mental designs that don't work where everything has to sit still until you evaluate it and then you make a decision.

There is a difference in strategy between conclusion oriented research, and decision oriented research where you have to be mounting a venture in the absence of evidence.

Right now one of the ways in which the status quo in education continues is the fact that a different level of evidence is required to change an educational venture than is required to sustain it.

In other words, we don't have any evidence at all in terms of the way in which education is proceeding over the last hundred years or what the effects are, but any time you propose to change it, someone says show me the evidence, and I say I am willing to produce evidence as an educational innovator, in the same amount that you can produce evidence to sustain what is now being done.

In other words, I think that is a fair question because otherwise the educational innovator must produce evidence both for innovation and for status quo.

I would like to propose that perhaps we need a national system of alternative public schools locally controlled, exempt from all regulation except antidiscrimination legislation, operated on the principle of volunteerism. Rich kids have always had an alternative in our society. They could go to the private schools. I can see no reason why average kids and poor kids should not also have an alternative, in other words, not requiring them to attend a school that is divergent in its educational philosophy but allowing them to have option of attending such a divergent school if they wish.

Present school facilities could be reoriented for this concept. Attendance lines could be redrawn so attendance could be on a voluntary basis but the school would continue to serve the same clientele it now

serves.

Perhaps different ages of children could be involved. Take elementary schoolchildren so it could be a cross generational program and schools might be a solution to the generation gap rather than part of the problem with the generation gap.

Right now, I think probably the problem of generation gap is exacerbated, by locking them away in an age group.

We need to find ways perhaps through alternative school mechanism to bring the community into the school during the day, have different courses available, having students out in the crafts laboratories of the community visiting public agencies, and so forth.

I think the National Institute of Education could develop a value of strategies for such programs in schools and could actually perhaps run more schools designed to highlight educational and evaluational alternatives.

There are many other things I could say. I would only like to say that one of the problems in education is that our vision is distorted by our experience with the past and new technologies are now available.

Now options are available but we have not begun to look at them. One of our problems is that all of our educational leaders have been trained in schools in a simpler society and it makes it very difficult for us to throw off our biases and prejudices and indeed find a way to go forward.

As some have suggested, one of the main purposes of education in the future will be not to teach kids things, but to teach them to forget things so they will be unhampered by boundaries of experiences. Mr. BRADEMAS. Thank you very much, Dr. Allen.

Mr. Reid, would you like to ask a question?

Mr. REID. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Dean Allen. I think you have touched on a number of the very provocative thoughts that are precisely what is relevant here. You have talked about the need of vision, not money. You have asked what is truth and pointed out that many students do not find values or classroom experience compatible with experience they have outside of home.

There is almost a total lack of respect in the classroom in some cases. Our system frequently is monolithic.

You have suggested various ranges of alternatives, alternative school programs and the like. Could I ask you just to speculate for a moment on the word "vision," the kind of new experiences that might have meaning, that might have effectiveness, that would deal with the real world and not a world that people don't recognize any more.

I do think we tend to have fairly structured research. I suspect that time is very short. It does not mean that you apply a national program that you don't know anything about, but neither does it suggest that we continue to go as we are going.

If you would touch on the word "vision" the kind of thing that ought to be touched on, it would be helpful.

What would you suggest?

Dr. ALLEN. First of all you take the area of values. Right now a teacher is expected to be objective. I would rather use the term neuter. A teacher is supposed to be dispassionate in the way he views the world. This is not a real world.

I would rather see a school that was constructed on the premise that a variety of points of view were represented within the school. In fact, the school curriculum should encompass all that is legal and sanctioned in society in its full diversity, including religious points of view, political points of view, various issues and points of view on morality.

Then parents and their children should have the option as to which of these broad range of experiences they participate in. I think that this is more in keeping with what I would see the pluralism of our society than the present abstraction which is unrealistic.

I think unfortunately by default we teach agnosticism in the school because religion can't be taught until school-we can't agree on any partisan version for school.

Therefore no religion is taught in school, agnosticism is a default position.

In the same way it is unlikely we are going to get agreement on any of the major value areas in the near future.

I think that is no reason to reevaluate us out of curriculum. I think all legal sanctioned values in this society ought to have a place in the curriculum and we ought to have a way to have students gain access to that selectivity.

That is one aspect. Another kind of vision would be the vision of what education would be like if we changed some of the basic assumptions. For example, you have to go to school to learn.