The CHAIRMAN. They are very much interested in this whole subject. Mr. BURKHARDT. It is very gratifying. The CHAIRMAN. They also say, "Brevity is the soul of wit." I believe the "wit" there really means "wisdom," does it not, Senator Smith? Senator SMITH. You mean we are going to speak about the wisdom of going to lunch now? The CHAIRMAN. I am sure that would be very welcome to all of but I was going to speak about the wisdom here of the statement this morning, how excellent it is. We express our very deep apprecia us, tion and thanks to the doctor for his fine statement. Senator SMITH. I join the Chairman. Thank you very much. (The constituent societies of the American Council of Learned Societies follow :) AMERICAN COUNCIL OF LEARNED SOCIETIES CONSTITUENT SOCIETIES (WITH DATE OF FOUNDING) American Philosophical Society, 1743 American Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1780 American Antiquarian Society, 1812 American Oriental Society, 1842 American Numismatic Society, 1858 American Philological Association, 1869 Archaeological Institute of American, 1879 Society of Biblical Literature and Exegesis, 1880 American Philosophical Association, 1901 The Renaissance Society of America, 1954 The CHAIRMAN. Our witnesses tomorrow will be: Mr. Philip Coombs, secretary and director of research, Fund for the Advancement of Education; Mr. John K. Weiss, assistant vice president, Fund for the Advancement of Education; Mr. Maurice Mitchell, president of Encyclopedia Britannica Films; Dr. C. R. Carpenter, Pennsylvania State University, State College, Pennsylvania, and Mr. T. Wilson Cahall, coordinator of the television project, Washington County School System of Hagerstown, Md. The committee will now stand in recess until tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock, when we will meet in our regular room in the Old Supreme Court Chamber of the Capitol. (Whereupon, at 1:30 p. m., the hearing was recessed until 10 a. m., Thursday, March 13, 1958.) SCIENCE AND EDUCATION FOR NATIONAL DEFENSE THURSDAY, MARCH 13, 1958 UNITED STATES SENATE, Washington, D. O. The committee met at 10:10 a. m., pursuant to recess, in the Old Supreme Court Chamber, the Capitol, Senator Lister Hill (chairman) presiding. Present: Senators Hill (presiding), Morse, Yarborough, and Allott. Present also: Senator Hoblitzell. Committee staff members present: Stewart E. McClure, chief clerk; Roy E. James, assistant chief clerk; John S. Forsythe, general counsel; William G. Reidy, Frederick R. Blackwell, and Michael J. Bernstein, professional staff members. The CHAIRMAN. The committee will kindly come to order. This morning we will receive testimony directed principally to title X of the national defense education bill, Senate 3187. Title X relates to research and experimentation in more effective utilization of television, radio, motion pictures, and related media for educational purposes. We have a number of witnesses who are experts in this field, including one witness who will give us a demonstration of educational films as used in the country's classrooms. Our first witness this morning is Mr. Philip Coombs, secretary and director of research, the Fund for the Advancement of Education. Mr. Coombs, we appreciate your being here and we would be delighted to now have you proceed in your own way. STATEMENT OF PHILIP COOMBS, SECRETARY AND DIRECTOR OF RESEARCH, THE FUND FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF EDUCATION; Mr. Weiss and I, who are both officers of the Fund for the Advancement of Education, were delighted indeed to accept your invitation to make some comments on the problems to which title X is directed. The Fund for the Advancement of Education has been engaged over the last half dozen years primarily in support of promising experiments and new developments in American schools and colleges, both public and private. We have of late particularly been interested in the pos sibility of harnessing to the service of education some of the more mo ern communications media. So we are delighted to draw upon c experience we have had for the use of this committee. We will, of course, be speaking for ourselves as individuals, siry our organization takes no position on any legislative questions. I should perhaps warn you, sir, that I am not a professional educat in the usual sense. I was trained as an economist. I have taught colleges, but I tend to view the problems of education somew through the eyes of an economist. BRIEF ANALYSIS OF THE EDUCATIONAL PROBLEM It might be useful before getting to the other witnesses, who will de with specific experiments, to sketch briefly an analysis of the educ tional problem the country faces, as we see it, and to suggest cers. basic lines of approach to solving these problems which are releva to the consideration of title X. In this connection, I would like to suggest that much of the curre educational discussion is marked by what seems to me to be irre vant and often irrational debate at a critical time when we have mer urgent and positive business. We can ill afford to divide and spe ourselves debating false issues of education, hunting scapegoats, ping for the 19th century, reacting defensively to legitimate criticism, c blindly resisting change. The real issue that should occupy us is not whether our schools a performing as well as they used to. The evidence is clear and over whelming. Despite many handicaps, our schools and colleges are clearly doing, on the whole, a remarkably better job than they used to For this we can be grateful." No society has ever achieved so much and such good education fcr so many. The real issue is whether our schools and colleges are dorg sufficiently better than they used to. Here the evidence is equal clear; they are not. The fault, if there is one, lies with all of us. EDUCATIONAL NEEDS OUTSTRIPPING EFFORTS As a society, we have allowed our rapidly expanding educationa needs to outstrip our educational efforts and performance. The task now is to close the educational gap, which has already grown danger ously wide and which could prove even more disastrous for our societ in the long run than inadequate military defenses. The children now in school need a far better education than any we could have dreamed of in the past, or can even conceive of now, if they are to cope successfully with the challenging problems and opportun ties of the 21st century in which they will live. What is an adequate education for people who will travel to the moon, who will enjoy unbounded solar energy, whose working hours will seem more like our lunch hours, who will live in a world of technological devices as unimaginable to us as TV was to Moses, and whose lives may be as long as Methuselah's? Are we giving an adequate education to the future President of the United States, who is attending school somewhere right now! DUAL CHALLENGE: BOOSTING BOTH ENROLLMENTS AND QUALITY American education must somehow meet the dual challenge of boosting enrollments and quality simultaneously to far higher levels than ever before. This will not be accomplished by returning to a curriculum and to methods which served the 19th century well, nor by spending more money simply to keep doing what the schools and colleges are already doing. The surest way to guarantee a steady erosion of quality at every level of American education during the next 10 years, when we can least atford poorer education, is to cling passionately and stubbornly to all of our present educational practices and folk-lore. Nothing short of a prompt and far-reaching revolution of present educational practices along with vast improvements in the curriculum, will enable our schools and colleges to avoid an erosion of quality and instead to raise quality along with enrollments. This, sir, is a strong statement, but I would like to indicate the basis for it, briefly. MUCH LARGER INVESTMENT IN EDUCATION We need, obviously, a much larger investment of dollars in education in the years ahead. We need more buildings. We can have both of these if we wish them strongly enough. The one thing we cannot have, however, is an adequate supply, over the next 10 years, of highly educated, highly talented manpower of the quality needed pot only for teaching but for every other profession, for business and for government. Thus, the principal bottleneck to better education in the years ahead will be a manpower bottleneck. It will take education itself ultimately to break this bottleneck by developing the potential talents of our youth as fully as possible. GROWING TEACHER SHORTAGES Let me illustrate. We calculate roughly that over the next 10 years the elementary and secondary schools of this country, on the basis of present pupil-teacher ratios, will require a total of new teachers equivalent to better than 40 percent of all 4-year college graduates who will be emerging in the same 10 years. If we had to rely entirely on the colleges to staff our schools, we would then require 4 out of every 10 college graduates to enter elementary and secondary teaching. This is, obviously, not going to happen. We have recently been getting as much as 20 percent of the college graduates into school teaching, at least for a time. At the college level we have estimated that over the next 10 years the total number of new college teachers needed, calculated on the basis of present teacher-pupil ratios, would be, optimistically, 3 times the number of new Ph. D.'s likely to be produced in the same ye I's. This assumes a substantial increase in the output of Ph. D.'s. But since no better than half of the new Ph. D.'s can be expected to enter college teaching, now that industry and government have discovered the Ph. D.'s and paid them better, we must anticipate that if we |