The White Falcon - 08.02.1964, Síða 6

6
WHITE FALCON
Saturday, February 8, 1964
“Time” Takes Incisive Look
At Armed Forces Education
Ed. Note: The following article taught history at Columbia, di-
appeared in the January 17 issue rected defense studies at Harvard
of “TIME” Magazine, page 72. and academic development at
Federal Education Brandeis.
At least in theory, it is now
possible for a semi-illiterate to
enter the U.S. Army and come
out a college graduate, with the
Pentagon paying 75% of the tab.
To apply its fabulous technology,
the U.S. military has become an
extraordinary teacher of every-
thing from astronautics to elec-
tronics to nucleonics to teaching
itself. Now the Defense Depart-
Katzenbach’s toughest problem
is the U.S.’s ninth biggest school
system — the 248 overseas schools
serving 161,040 children of mili-
tary men abroad. He hears bitter
complaints from the schools’ 7,000
civilian teachers, whose pay has
risen only $100 a year since 1960.
But he has three applicants for
every vacancy, and is striving
hard to standardize everything
ment even has a Deputy Assistant
Secretary for Education. He is
Edward L. Katzenbach Jr., a
driving man of 44 who runs a
$350 million-a-year empire that
spurs learning throughout the
Armed Forces, although it does
not control such elite professional
schools as West Point and the
Naval War College.
The U.S. serviceman now spends
50% to 80% of his time in schools,
says a report issued last week by
Columbia University’s Teachers
College. The military has 300,000
students in schools all over the
world, from Arctic huts to the
National War College. In the U.S.
alone are 300 military schools
teaching 4,000 courses from the
three-R level to the Ph.D. Even
the raw recruit now spends a
third of his time in a classroom;
the general gets the equivalent
of two or three years of graduate
study. To keep everyone learning
off-duty as well, 33 correspondence
schools provide 2,500 mail order
courses to 1,000,000 servicemen
and servicewomen around the
globe.
WELTER OF WASTE. Military
learning is also balm for the un-
employment problem: at least
60% of what the services teach is
directly applicable to civilian jobs.
Hundreds of thousands of service-
men go back to become everything
from auto mechanic to bacterio-
logist to weatherman. Almost
1,000,000 men now in the services
have been raised to the equivalent
of a high school education since
they entered — a figure equal to
about a tenth of the nation’s an-
nual school dropout rate.
Until recently, military educa-
tion was a welter of waste, dup-
lication and congressional be-
wilderment. In 1961, Katzenbach
was brought in to organize mili-
tary learning, coordinate it with
civilian education. Katzenbach,
whose younger brother Nicholas
is U.S. Deputy Attorney General,
had the right pedigree for both
sides. He earned his Legion of
Merit as a Marine officer at Eni-
wetok, his Ph.D. at Princeton. He
Official U.S. Navy Photo
from grading to accounting.
Katzenbach’s happiest opera-
tion is the 22-year-old U.S. Armed
Forces Institute, a mail-order
education factory in Madison,
Wis. Proud product of World
War II, it has now enrolled more
than 5,000,000 students, distri-
buted more than 44 million text-
books. For $5, the shopper can
pick any of 6,400 courses, from
elementary through college level;
if he completes the first course,
the rest are free. College-level
courses (now the majority) are
provided directly from cooperat-
ing colleges, but the colleges are
still sticky about credits for non-
residents. One captain has taken
enough courses to get a Ph.D.,
but has not stayed put long
enough to get a B.A. “This is
a mobile group and the universi-
ties have not caught up,” Kat-
zenbach complains.
As a partial solution, the ser-
vices now send officers, who are
within a semester of a degree to
civilian campuses to live at full
pay while pursuing fields from
physics to philosophy. The Air
Academy sends new graduates on
to M.I.T. or CalTech for masters’
degrees; the Army picks 200 en-
listed men a year to attend civilian
colleges, pays about three-fourths
of the cost. The Navy sends even
WAVES off to earn science and
engineering degrees, pays four-
years costs at 19 colleges and uni-
versities.
The drive is on to make every
officer a college graduate (about
65% are) and every noncom a
high school graduate (about 73%
of all enlisted men are). While
they sit 80 ft. underground, in
ICBM launching capsules, Air
Force officers now spend most of
their time studying for master’s
degrees. Katzenbach has stirred
the Joint Chiefs of Staff to such
interest that now “a big fat com-
mittee” is hard at work relating
education to overall strategy.
To help streamline the military,
Katzenbach has worked up a new
system management school, helped
the Navy start a computer insti-
tute to teach the art to all ranks.
To educate the military about its
impact on society, he has designed
new U.S.A.F.I. courses that re-
late military and civilian techno-
logy back to 1750. To teach sol-
diers “what society thinks of
them,” he set up another course
on 19 war novels, from Stendahl’s
“The Red and the Black” to Jules
Romains’ “Verdun”. “You sure are
educating us,” says one of his
majors, who has read six of the
novels so far.
RESULTS COUNT. The mili-
tary has an equal chance to edu-
cate civilian education itself. Ser-
vice schools have pioneered in
everything from training films to
programmed instruction. At Long
Island’s Naval Training Device
Center, 600 experts spend $60
million a year to produce a fan-
tastic array of teaching aids,
from mock submarines to simulat-
ed human flesh that bleeds on
order. The Pentagon is now teach-
ing foreign languages to more
than 2,000,000 students, biggest
such Babel in the U.S. In Wash-
ington, D.C., and Monterey, Calif.,
it runs two of the world’s most
effective language schools —
founts of the speak-first, gram-
mar-later method.
Every service now has exemp-
lary teacher-training programs
with no nonsense over “philosophy
of education” courses. Civilian
schools could well emulate the
clear, logical, incisive teaching
that results. In military teaching,
results count, and the motto is
unforgiving: “if the student has
failed to learn, you have failed to
teach.”
Official U.S. Navy Photo
THE PRESIDENT CHOICE — Carl T. Rowan (left), confers with
President Lyndon B. Johnson at the White House after Mr. Johnson
named him to succeed dward R. Murrow as Director of the United
States Information Agency (USIA). Mr. Rowan, an ex-newsman, was
formerly U. S. Ambassador to Finland.
Dorians To Appear In
Capital City Feb. 10
The Dorian Quintet will ap-
pear at the Hotel Saga in Reykja-
vik, Monday, February 10.
The Quintet, organized in 1961,
features John Perras on flute,
Charles Kuskin playing oboe,
Jean Taylor on bassoon, William
Lewis on clarinet, and William
Brown playing the French horn.
Although a young group, the
Quintet has appeared in Amster-
dam, Zurich, Salsburg, Vienna,
Jerusalem, and The Hague. Their
reputation was established with
the entire spectrum of woodwind
literature. Frequently commanded
for their repertoire and program-
ming of both standard and contem-
porary works, the Quintet has
proven that careful selection can
provide an exciting program,
whether or not the audience is
familiar with the literature.
During the 1964 season, the
Dorians will tour for three months
in Africa under the auspices of
the Department of State’s Cultur-
al Presentations Program. The
Dorians are honored to be chosen
to represent American chamber
music and artists to the people
of Africa. It is the first American
group to do so. The Quintet will
return home after concerts in
Europe where they have been in-
vited to return.
GPO Offering Edition
Of Kennedy Eulogies
Americans will probably never
forget the stirring eulogies to the
late President John F. Kennedy
delivered' in the rotunda of the
United States Capitol.
A special edition of the words of
Mike Mansfield, Senate Majority
Leader; Earl Warren, Chief Jus-
tice of the Supreme Court and
John W. McCormack, Speaker of
the House, has been printed by
the government.
This booklet, Catalog No. 88-1 :S
doc. 46, is available from the Su-
perintendent of Documents, Gov-
ernment Printing Office, Wash-
ington, D. C. 20402, for five cents
per copy or 100 copies for $3.75.
SNAKES BEWARE—Actress Car-
roll Baker is getting a lot of at-
tention from cast and crewr mem-
bers on film location in Utah. Car-
roll says that her black leather
thigh high boots, pink stretch pants
bulky sweater, leather jacket and
western style hat are for protec-
tion “against rattlesnakes, spiders
and cold.” Those lucky rattle-
snakes !
Missile Sub Launched
The fleet ballistic missile sub-
marine Casimir Pulaski was
scheduled to be launched Feb. 1.
There are a total of 41 fleet
ballistic missile subs programmed,
of which 16 are commissioned and
12 launched but not commissioned.