Washington - U.S.A.
COFFIN, TRIS
By Tris Coffin The Crisis in U.S. Education And Why It Will Continue In the old Senate Chamber where great minds once displayed their knowledge, America's appalling education crisis has been...
...The prospective school teacher also soon learns that the salary he will earn will depend not on how well he teaches, but only on how long he has taught...
...Every Russian youth must study a foreign language for six of his ten school years...
...This solution, to be blunt about it, has absolutely no chance of passing Congress now...
...Yet only 98,000 college graduates qualified for teaching last June, and, of those, only 70 per cent actually went into the schools...
...And nuclear physicist Edward Teller added: "High school teachers are being trained solely in one particular subject: how to teach...
...The true scholar, from whom new research and advanced teaching must flow, is becoming a rarity...
...Yet we pay school teachers less than laborers, clerks or salesmen...
...Commissioner of Education Dr...
...This apathy is in contrast with the spirit that built the American public school system...
...A brilliant Negro youth in Copiah County, Mississippi is lucky to stay out of trouble, much less get a competent education...
...Lee A. Du Bridge, president of California Institute of Technology, commented: "Teaching is clearly one of the most important, most challenging and most difficult and demanding tasks in a modern society...
...In 1956, less than 5,000 received PhDs in science and engineering to fill the thousands of places in colleges, universities and the 5,000 industrial laboratories in the U.S...
...Detlev W. Bronk, president of the National Academy of Sciences and National Research Council...
...They are not well trained in the subject matter they have to teach...
...von Braun testified: "At the very age when children are particularly receptive and want inspiration, the classroom standard is oriented to the slowest child in the class...
...On the other hand, parents have not exhibited any angry concern over the educational crisis...
...is woefully behind Russia...
...The median salary for a beginning science teacher in 1956 was $3,600, while the average starting pay for an engineer was $5,200...
...He has to take too many vocational and teacher-training methodology courses...
...In another field vital to America's future, appealing to men's minds, the U.S...
...This shortage will reach 270,000 in twelve years, which means that in 1970 some 2 million high-school graduates will have to be denied college entrance...
...Marion B. Folsom, Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, added these disturbing facts: Graduates of the ten-year Soviet school system (there were 1.3 million graduates in 1956) had five to six times the hours of required instruction in math and science as many U.S...
...The hours of Senate testimony lead but to one conclusion: The United States is wasting its greatest asset—the minds of its youth—because of smugness, miserliness, bigotry and the diversion of energies to bigger fins on cars and deadlier bombs...
...The Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens fathered public schools in Pennsylvania...
...Even the equal-facilities philosophy which prompted a belated improvement of Negro schools has almost been swallowed up in the "massive resistance" launched by the penny-pinching squire of Winchester, Virginia, Senator Harry Byrd...
...Most revealing is the way the once proud profession of teaching is being shunned...
...By 1956, this dropped to 4,320...
...They were siphoned off by higher pay ahd prestige in industry...
...Only 15 per cent of our high school students are studying any foreign tongue...
...Laboratory facilities, library ma...
...Education And Why It Will Continue In the old Senate Chamber where great minds once displayed their knowledge, America's appalling education crisis has been spread out before a committee of Senators...
...The deterioration of the American schools did not begin recently...
...when large taxpayers balked at the cost, his answer was: "Ignorance is more costly than taxes...
...It is opposed by the National Education Association and undoubtedly would be fought bitterly by states with low-grade schools...
...President Eisenhower has little enthusiasm for educational reform, despite the reports of educational and scientific advisers...
...Many prospective teachers are being driven from the schools for another reason...
...The most important thing in a teacher is that he should love his subject and that he should be able to show that he loves this subject matter...
...The explanation may lie in a chance remark by Senator Barry Goldwater (R.-Ariz...
...I. I. Rabi, past chairman of the President's Science Advisory Committee, and Dr...
...Unless a person is prepared for continued learning, I do not see how he is going to be prepared to live wisely and effectively as a member of a democratic society which is rapidly changing...
...Put in terms of military survival alone, this waste threatens to destroy the United States...
...Lawrence G. Derthick added: "It is not uncommon to find a complete absence of laboratory facilities in general science and biology courses...
...More than a fourth of the brightest students in high school (27 per cent of the boys, 35 per cent of the girls) never go to college...
...The shortage of teachers is equally startling in colleges and universities...
...Other signs of the educational crisis are: • The present shortage of 140.000 classrooms will take from ten to twelve years to overcome...
...The only way to meet this crisis, according to the weeks of testimony, is for the Federal Government to enter the field of education much as it did human welfare in the Social Security Administration...
...My experience is that 99 out of 100 children are happiest when put to work at challenging tasks...
...But only 60 per cent of the qualified science teachers entered the schools...
...Later, he will acquire it at much greater effort and less completely...
...about 61,000 were in high schools which taught neither chemistry nor physics...
...As early as World War II, the erosion of U.S...
...This I regard as a disgraceful situation, and it has done much to attract into the profession the slow and lazy and repel the able and ambitious...
...As a result, let us face it, we have not attracted, by and large, the smartest of our young people in recent years, into the teaching profession at the elementary and high school levels...
...A teacher who aspires to teach mathematics in high schools gets very little time to take mathematics in college...
...Congressmen report far more mail for the postal pay raise than for aid to education...
...Science and mathematics are the keys to modern defense, and we are faltering in the race with Russia because of a lack of trained men in these fields...
...This is the ridiculous load of so-called "education" courses required by many states...
...In the USSR, 40 per cent of all high schools and 65 per cent of all colleges have mandatory courses in English...
...I think the states have gone too far in their requirement for methodology and technique courses rather than in substantive courses...
...Dr...
...I have found in my own school district that, over a period of 52 years, only 9 per cent of the people turned out to vote on important things like studies, teachers' salaries, buildings and so forth...
...Of this figure, J. B. Culpeper of the State Institutions of Higher Learning said: "When we think of the loss to the nation because of this undeveloped talent for science, engineering and foreign languages, the prospect becomes one of critical importance...
...The elementary school is wasting precious hours which should be devoted to acquiring knowledge and habits of learning...
...Only about one in three American high-school graduates have taken chemistry, one of four physics, one of three intermediate algebra, and one of eight trigonometry or solid geometry...
...Morris Meister, principal of the Bronx High School of Science, added: "I think that the essence of democracy is to give every individual an opportunity to attain his potential, and you cannot do so if you place our able children in a heterogeneous group whose excellence and intelligence are dragged downward toward mediocrity...
...I think there is nothing more dangerous to a bright child between the ages of 8 and 15 than a boring school...
...Two years ago, 100,000 seniors were in public high schools which offered no advanced math...
...He said: "When they are children, they can acquire the habit of thinking which a theoretician needs, or which a person needs who wants to apply theory to practical matters...
...State Department studies show that only one of four incoming Foreign Service officers are proficient in any foreign language...
...There is an appalling spread in educational standards...
...The American education system is geared to the slowest child...
...The year before, the supply of new high school foreign-language teachers was 25 per cent short of demand...
...Teller, among others, believes the receptive intelligence of the child should be utilized to acquire study habits and the rudiments of science, math and foreign languages...
...Chamber of Commerce with defeating the school-construction bill in Congress last summer...
...Schools no longer teach students to think...
...A Selective Service spokesman said: "Educational deficiency, or failure to pass Army intelligence tests primarily because of educational deficiency, has deprived the Armed Forces of more physically fit men than have the operations of the enemy...
...In 1950, the colleges graduated 9,096 qualified science teachers...
...But, unfortunately, the low salaries are but a symbol of the low regard in which the teacher is held by the community...
...Of this, Dr...
...There is, in other words, no merit system in the salary scales of our public schools...
...School boards in many areas have either been controlled or greatly influenced by such large taxpayer groups as the Chambers of Commerce, whose interest is in keeping the tax rate down...
...And, while 40 per cent of all college teachers had doctoral degrees in 1953-54...
...At 829 colleges and universities recently queried, 1,196 teaching positions were unfilled...
...The shortage of high-school science teachers is dangerous and getting worse...
...More than 100,000 teachers left the profession last year...
...William G. Carr, executive secretary of the NEA, credited the U.S...
...education was damaging the defense of freedom...
...they fill them with facts of little value...
...And U.S...
...This is the state of American education in the month of June 1958...
...And the home folks seem to be apathetic...
...Bronk testified: "There is an inadequate revelation to students of the joys and pleasures of the intellectual life which was a foundation for our great nation...
...The staunch defender of the tenure or seniority system for teachers" pay is the National Education Association, which is dominated by classroom teachers...
...In New York, he may be selected for the Bronx High School of Science...
...American schools have failed to keep up with population growth, with the eruption of new knowledges and techniques required to run a modern society, and with vast social and political changes...
...An additional 228,000 teachers are needed this year in elementary and secondary schools to meet enrollment increases, and to replace teachers leaving the schools...
...Wernher von Braun, director of the Army's missile research center...
...The education crisis moves far beyond languages and science...
...schools...
...In North Carolina, 58 per cent of science departments were rated "fair" or "poor" in equipment...
...One of every four teachers receives less than $3,500 a year and about 46,000 get less than $2,500...
...A national standard for elementary and high-school education is looked on favorably by such men of learning as Dr...
...The rebellion of the South against integration threatens to wipe out the public school systems of those states...
...Du Bridge said: "I have seen too -many students of good intellectual capacity withdraw from preparing for teaching, because they did not feel that the teacher-training programs were of enough intellectual caliber...
...A child living in many rural communities of the South does not receive the schooling needed to enter an accredited college...
...Congress, particularly in an election year, is not going to do anything unless it is pushed by the home folks...
...Less than 10 per cent of men college students and 8 per cent of women are from families with an annual income of less than $3,000...
...It is true that teaching has other attractions beside the monetary one...
...It would set up minimum standards while permitting full local control, provide funds for classrooms and teachers either by loans or grants, and develop a scholarship and fellowship program to encourage good minds and train needed teachers...
...I believe there is too much emphasis on facts, and too little emphasis on training in the ability to think...
...Furthermore, the number of college graduates prepared to teach languages dropped 30 per cent to a low of 1,525 in 1957...
...In West Virginia, for example, science is presented almost wholly as a textbook course...
...Meister testified that communities are spending two to four times as much for the slow learners as for the bright and talented students...
...At the hearings, the immense challenges overtaking America, the huge strides of Soviet education and the alarming weaknesses of our schools were put in the record day after day...
...Some three-fourths of the world's population, or 2 billion people, speak languages rarely taught in the United States...
...Fewer than 10 public high schools and only a tenth of our colleges offer Russian...
...The pay offered teachers is certainly one reason...
...It colors all Congressional discussions of aid to education, and has all but paralyzed Capitol Hill...
...Finances are a big factor...
...within three years the figure had dropped to 23 per cent...
...and thus the interest of the brighter children is blunted at this very critical age...
...The chairman of the President's Committee on Scientists and Engineers said: "Today, Russia has more scientists, engineers and technicians than the United States, and is graduating more than twice as many every year The rate of Russian progress in most scientific fields is so rapid that, unless we broaden and strengthen our own efforts, there is little question of Soviet superiority five or ten years from now...
...terials and other equipment for science teaching are often outdated or inadequate, Secretary Folsom testified...
...Yet, despite this testimony, there has been no spirited demand for action by President Eisenhower, the leaders of Congress, or the American public...
Vol. 41 • June 1958 • No. 24
