BASIC EDUCATIONAL TECHNIQUES ARE NOT UNDERSTOOD

Dr. WIESNER. Well, I can talk at almost any level. I could start at the most basic level of knowledge that I think could contribute in the long term-just to run the gamut. We know practically nothing about the memory process, how the brain works, how we recall information, about reenforcement of information taken in by the eye and the ear. Senator BAKER. And the acquisition and redelivery of information. Dr. WIESNER. But inevitably understanding of those things would allow us to judge whether certain techniques will be effective. You would get a lot of clues from basic research if we had some understandings. Now, this is one extreme.

At the other extreme are all the teaching aids that are flooding the market today. Programed-learning books are being developed at a great pace. No one has really done a very effective job of designing these with different modes and different styles of feedback of information, and so on, and subjected them to enough testing to know whether one technique is more effective or better than another. As a matter of fact, even the question of how you determine the impact of testing on learning is something no one understands. We have endless debates at the university level about whether we should have tests and give grades or not, because we know that for some students they provide incentives, but that they are also destructive for some students and tend to make most of them concentrate on memorization rather than understanding. But we do not know enough; we have not done enough experimentation to be able to answer this simple question. I could go on indefinitely listing questions which every educator has on his mind but to which he has no answer, and to which proper experimentation may provide some clues and maybe even answers in the long term.

EUCATIONAL INNOVATION IS UNDERFINANCED

Senator BAKER. How much basic research, how much pure theoretical thought, organized effort is going into this business of trying to understand the learning and the educational process?

Dr. WIESNER. Well, it is hard to say right now because things are in such a tremendous state of flux. I said before you came in that, while working in the Government in 1963, we made a survey, and we concluded that the total amount of money that was going into innovation, including better furniture and better movie projectors and learning, was about $90 million. The Federal Government, through the Office of Education, has been providing since then, as a result of initiatives by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and the Congress, higher levels of support. However, I do not know precisely what it amounts to. I have the impression it is on the order of $200 or $300 million. But just judging by the lack of support for worthwhile activities that I know people want to start if they could find support, it is clear that we are still really underfinanced compared to the opportunities or compared to another criteria which I talked about before you came in the fraction of its income that a strong, progressive industry spends for research and development as a fraction of its budget. The

educational budget is somewhere between $40 and $50 billion a year and 1 percent of that, you see, would be $0.5 billion. Most industries tend to spend between 2 to 3 percent for the whole gamut of things called research and development, starting with basic research and going all the way to hardware development.

THREE BASIC FEATURES TO CONSIDER IN URBAN PLANNING

Senator BAKER. The point I am reaching for is that the quality of man's knowledge and his ability to acquire and redeliver information is going to have a very substantial impact upon the design of our future society. It will have a very real impact on the nature and the type of urban center that we propose to design for the future.

Dr. WIESNER. Sure.

Senator BAKER. And I was trying to isolate the basic or cardinal features of an urban or a rural society, for that matter, that ought to feed into our considerations for planning for the future. And the first one I listed was this matter, was the level and extent of useful educational information. The second one I have in mind is the whole concept of transportation, is the question of the relationship of the urban center to the people who either work or reside within it which would be altered. The concept would be altered radically if we had radical alterations in the transportation systems. And the third, then would be the cost and the accessibility of energy, new energy sources. And with those three features, rather basic features in mind, I wonder really if we are in a position now to make a projection with any sort of reasonable validity of the design and structure of an urban center or the quality of our society, say, 10 or 20 or 30 years from now without basic information about these features and these aspects of our continuing technological evolution and development.

TECHNOLOGICAL ADVANCEMENTS HAVE LONG DEVELOPMENT PERIODS

Dr. WIESNER. Well, I do not think that anyone is smart enough to know what technology will have produced 30 years from now.

When I was working here, I found myself embroiled in a debate about how to go to the moon. I used to wake up and say to myself that if anyone would have told me 2 or 3 years before that that was how I was going to be spending my time, I would say he was nuts. I do not think that any one of us can predict what the technological opportunities will be 10 years from now, but we do know what will be available on a large scale 10 years from now because we know that it takes about 10 years to exploit a new idea so that one that emerges today is not going to be fully available and widely disseminated until a decade from now. It sometimes takes even longer. It has taken 15 to 20 years for nuclear energy to come to the point where it is a major factor in our society.

So, one thing I think one has to appreciate is that there are very long time constants in most developments. You could not transform the physical condition of the United States in 1 year if the Congress

unanimously passed a law committing all the resources of the country to the task. You could not do it in 10 years, but you could make a very substantial start.

So new developments take a long time, but at any given moment there are many new technological tools to assist us. And we do have better transportation today, and we do have means of providing better education or better medical care. And what we must do is to try to force the character of the evolving society in the directions that our most optimistic-I should not say most optimistic-our reasonably optimistic predictions tell us we could go in if we worked at it. For example, what kind of health care could we give in New York City 10 years from today if we really use all the techniques we have available?

AVOID OVERDIRECTING SOCIOLOGICAL GROWTH

Senator BAKER. I agree, but the point I am once again reaching for is the proposition that while we agree, I think, to the proposition that we have to organize our resources to do the most intelligent job of planning we can, we also, it seems to me, must accept the proposition that the social system is a closed system and as such you have qualities of observation of theory, of experimentation, and then the inevitable feedback.

Dr. WIESNER. Sure.

Senator BAKER. And we have got to resist the temptation to overstructure or to overplan or overdirect the sociological growth.

RESULTS OF CHANGE ARE OFTEN UNPREDICTABLE

Dr. WIESNER. I agree completely, and this is why I, in the discussions here today, have resisted too much Federal power in the decisionmaking aspects of the urban field. The planning and management should be done locally. I think some of the problems that Senator Kennedy pointed to in the school systems of big cities came about because even within a community, things can get too rigid. As you really said in your discussion, and as I tried to say in my paper, society is a continuously evolving organism. And no matter how well you think you can anticipate what the people will want or what the consequences of interacting decisions will be, if you try to do two things at once, they may not be totally compatible, they may not go together, and you do not discover this until you have gone a substantial distance with them, and then you have to make alterations and change your objectives or methods. This is just a way of life.

The thing that is bearing in on us, though, is that we have become very efficient at changing things, but we have not really improved our ability to predict the outcome of our actions and so as we change things on a larger and larger scale, the unanticipated problems that we have to contend with, the problems that we ourselves have created inadvertently, get larger and larger.

Senator BAKER. Mr. Chairman, one last comment and question, if I may, and this will conclude my inquiries of the witness.

EFFICIENT MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCES URGED

No matter how much it may offend our human vanity and aspirations, we do not know the sum total of all the answers we need to provide, even with what we are capable of producing today. Does it seem to you that our principal deficit in the social planning field—and then in due course the matter of solving our urban problems-is our inability to coordinate, collect, and intelligently utilize the feedback, the collection of information, and the data that are necessary to determine, if you will pardon the colloquialism, where we are at?

Dr. WIESNER. Well, I would not say that of all our social problems this is our most serious problem. But I do believe that the business of trying to manage our resources effectively when we try to do things like make model cities is our most serious problem. Actually, I believe that setting our social goals to provide ambitions and a spirit worthy of the people is probably the deepest problem we have.

SOCIETY SHOULD REFLECT HUMAN VALUES

You talked about the human values, and I think putting adequate emphasis on the human values, giving people some real meaning to their life, either through creative challenges or through other opportunities is probably the greatest challenge of this society.

Senator BAKER. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Senator RIBICOFF. Thank you very much.

We are very grateful to you, Dr. Wiesner. Your testimony and your appendixes by the staff of MIT are certainly appreciated. Our apologies for keeping you so long, but it indicates we are all interested in what you have to say. We hope we have the opportunity of calling on you and MIT in the future for help.

Dr. WIESNER. Thank you.

Senator RIBICOFF. I have several documents which discuss the role of technology in dealing with various urban problems. I will place them in the record at this point.

(The documents referred to follow :)

EXHIBIT 215

EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT,
OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY,
Washington, April 26, 1963.

Hon. LUTHER H. HODGES,
Secretary of Commerce,

Washington, D.C.

DEAR MR. SECRETARY: We are pleased to submit to you the report to the Panel on Civilian Technology, entitled "Better Housing for the Future". The report makes specific recommendations for governmental activities to support and encourage science, technology, and educational functions related to the building industry. I am hopeful that your Department, through its Civilian Industrial Technology Program and the work of the Bureau of Standards, will provide some of the substantive support for government actions recommended in this report. In particular, I have in mind support of work leading to the establishment of criteria of worthiness for innovations in building and building practice; the encouragement of interdisciplinary studies in building technology at colleges and universities; and the dissemination of technical information about buildng technology and developments, tailored to meet the particular needs of potential user groups.

Sincerely yours,

JEROME B. WIESNER.

THE SECRETARY OF COMMERCE,
Washington, D.C., May 9, 1963.

Dr. JEROME B. WIESNER,
Director, Office of Science and Technology, Executive Office of the President,
Washington, D.C.

DEAR MR. WIESNER: Thank you for sending me the report "Better Housing for the Future." I assure you we willingly accept the responsibility of providing some of the substantive support for the governmental actions recommended. As you know, the Department is deeply interested in and has been working toward the support and encouragement of science, technology, and education related to the building industry. We shall, therefore, take the necessary additional steps to implement the recommendations in the report that are applicable to the Department's missions.

Sincerely yours,

LUTHER H. HODGES,
Secretary of Commerce.

BETTER HOUSING FOR THE FUTURE

A REPORT TO THE PANEL ON CIVILIAN TECHNOLOGY, OFFICE OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, EXECUTIVE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT, FROM ITS SUB-PANEL ON HOUSING

APRIL 29, 1963.

This report on "Better Housing for the Future" was prepared in response to a request by the Panel on Civilian Technology for information on opportunities for and obstacles to technological innovation in the housing field. The report is being made public in the hope that it will contribute to the thinking of all those concerned with this vital sector of our economy.

The Panel on Civilian Technology was established under the joint auspices of the President's Special Assistant for Science and Technology, the Chairman of the Council on Economic Advisers, and the Secretary of Commerce. The panel has examined means to stimulate civilian research and development as well as to use existing technology more effectively. It has addressed itself primarily to those sectors of our economy where major social and economic benefits can be expected to accrue from technological advances.

Building constitutes one of the nation's largest industries, representing approximately 11 percent of the gross national product or nearly 60 billion dollars annually. Of this amount slightly more than one-third, or an estimated 24 billion dollars, is devoted to the construction and major renovation of single-family houses and multi-family low-rise housing units.

During the past fifteen years there have been impressive gains in the provision of housing for our growing population. Much of the nation's pent-up housing need has been satisfied and in the process, the housing industry has undergone a fundamental change in character from an ill-defined handcraft activity to a local well-organized industry, with many important innovations being introduced along a broad front ranging from finance to technology.

In the course of this study a consensus has been discerned among experts in the housing field that this change in the structure of the industry, dramatic as it is, is but the first in what will be a process of continuing change for many years to come. This process must be accelerated, for at least in one respect, the fullest exploitation of technological methods, housing fails and will continue to fail to contribute as fully as it might to national economic growth.

It is also generally agreed that there is many another important problem which the housing industry must solve if it is to achieve its full measure of importance and success. Prominent among such problems are those which lie in the area of satisfying the social aspirations of our people. By way of examples, there is the need to provide good housing for all economic and social groups within our society, and the need for replacing a large segment of our housing inventory which is presently near the end of its useful life and threatened with massive deterioration. We have come to recognize that good housing, sound neighborhoods, and well-designed communities are simply different aspects of a single problem. Only through full exploitation of our scientific and technological capability can we produce enough housing of the right kind to lead, ultimately, to a general improvement in the living environment of the individual-a step so necessary for continued social progress.