Oral essays on education; Charles A. Siepmann

Oral essays on education. A dynamic radio series designed to present leading personalities of our society as they attempt to discover the scope of problems which confront modern education. This week Dr. James in Terra Michigan State University College of Education again interviewed Mr. Charles ACP chairman of the department of communications in education at New York University. Well discuss the future of mass media and education and knowledge here is doctors in terror from this vast mass of teachers that we have hundreds of thousands of people involved in this at varying levels of education. Some people who fit your criteria emerge from this huge conglomeration of people and they find their way to the top and we recognize them very easily because we hear reports of them and then we go and we see them or we run across them in some nature or vein and they identify immediately for us. Doesn't there seem to be a tendency to make these put these people in situations where their efforts are dispersed. Maybe it's a tendency to put them in

administrative accomplishments or to put them in a situation where we sort of destroy their own creativity. Yes. In his teaching. How do you see is this true. Does this happen does this go on or do we tend to put these in these top flight teachers do we tend to put them in there in a situation where they can accomplish the most. I would say not. It's a difficult problem but is a problem that I believe can be licked by an accident that has occurred which we in the teaching profession I think have largely overlooked. Which brings me to a subject which I'm tempted to talk about of great length and it has two aspects. And if I may come to your point I'll come to it in directly here. I think that with respect to teacher training and the awareness of the teacher has a role in our modern society. We in our

profession have overlooked a fact that is so close to us that like things under our nose we've taken it for granted and not asked questions about it. And I would put it this way for hundreds of years we in the teaching profession have shared with the churches the privilege of an almost monopolistic. Responsibility for the interpretation and transmission from generation to generation of cultural values. We have been the conveyor belt of transmission of what ultimately society recognised as the true values by which it seeks to live teaches and the churches have had this monopoly in our generation. This monopoly has been taken from us by the advent in the last 50 years of the mass media of communication film radio television a mass production of books

paperbacks etc. magazines a world of mass communication. This is a rival for us. Which puts us now for the first time in a competitive situation. We are struggling for the minds and spirits of children as we seek to teach them. The mass media of communication are rivaling us and I like such for the loyalty and attention of youngsters and oldsters too. And if you ask me who is winning out in this competitive situation I would say that the mass media are winning. They're winning in the sense of the actual time that young children and grown ups alike devote to the mass media. It's a known fact that the average American spends more time with one or other of the mass media than he or she spends on anything else in life except work and sleep. Not only is a question of time but is a question of the interests that

evoked particularly among the young. With television this now starts with early infancy. We have little children of two years old with that glazed staff sitting at the front of that the box in the living room. They are under the continuous influence of these mass media. This raises a very important question. Is the language that the mass media bespeaks of the mass media biz speak in terms of implicit that it was the language that we in the teaching profession speak. I say in part at least it is not. And as a result we are subjecting children to the prospect of growing up and schizophrenia acts. We talk one language of values of the mass media in many instances and the quiz program scandal is a case in point. Speak a different value judgment. We in the profession of teaching can see children as not instruments the world ends of our own but as objects of our devoted

teaching to enable them to find themselves we are in Iraq to me is the basic tenet of the Democratic creed that an individual requires reverence as an individual whom we must never use but that this is of our own. And here I'd like if I may to quote a great man than a Cho. And he puts this in his papa spect if he gives us the idea of the opposite of the ideal with respect to living and relationships. How does he put it. This from Joy of Life. The being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one that being thought early worn out before you are thrown on the scrapheap. That being a force of nature. Instead of a selfish feverish little cloud of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy

and also the only true tragedy in life is that being used by personally minded men or purposes you recognize as a base or arrest is at worst misfortune on mortality. This is misery. Slaves are a hell on earth. This to me is superb Lee said. The greatest sin that any man or agency can commit in our culture is to use an individual as an instrument for ends of his own. And I'm afraid I'm going to have to say that by and large the mass media are guilty of making instruments of Pittsboro Gensis for purposes that of their own. This new rival force of mass communication has not been reckoned with in teaching. We've had audiovisual instruction as part of teacher training although even though we've

had that but that is there are still only two states in the union that recognized some understanding of audiovisual instruction as a condition of teacher's certificate. It's a difficult mission. But the problem is now much larger than this. How are we going to deal with this. It's a frantic problem. How are we going to address ourselves to the rival that we face. How many schools are actually addressing themselves with this question at all. How much does mass communication figure in our teaching. I believe that the mass media are potentially allies of tremendous power and influence. Allas. But only as we contribute to these mass media and their use in constructive terms. And as we intend mediately provide the antibodies in the bloodstream of a child to immunize it against the corruptive and corrosive influences that stem from the instrumental izing of individuals. This on one

side. Now let's turn the constructive side to the constructive side of the situation. I said that I believe that potentially the mass media are formidable allies of OWS and this means that we must use them and enter into mass communication wherever opportunity arises. And we have a medium. Today the potentialities for which of which in the context of the crisis we face I believe has been desperate to underestimate it. I'm talking of television. I'm not talking about commercial television I'm talking about television and its direct use and teaching in the classroom. We now have 44 educational television stations on the air. The FCC has reserved two hundred fifty eight frequencies of which 100 and what is it. Hundred ballots take 44 from one hundred fifty two hundred fifty eight. And you've got the balance of stations on which we have not taken up option. But tension. We have the prospect of

an alternative national network of educational TV which we can put to multiple uses that we can find myself at the moment to its possible uses in television in education in the classroom. Here Again. Something has happened that we have been totting neglected. Let's face the fact that today as always the number of great and spotting teaches is small. A great teacher is often born than made. The quality of that influence is I believe a difference in kind rather than a degree. The tragedy has been that over the years great teachers have been confined with respect to the range of that influence by the range of The Voice or the square footage of a classroom in which they teach. Plato was a great teacher but he couldn't teach more than a small group of persons within the range of his voice in the academy in

Athens. This has plagued us all along. Great teachers are rare and few and because of these physical circumstances the extent of that influence has been limited. This is no longer true. The miracles of modern science have given us through television a medium by which this obstacle to a lower range of influence of the great teacher has gone for all time. And we as of this hour could make available to every child and I believe we should as part of their rights as children and students. We can make available to them the opportunity as at least part of their educational experience to sit at the foot of a great teacher not literally physically but in terms of the dis embodied image of that man or woman as he comes to the child in a classroom over the television screen. Given the crisis quantitative and qualitative that we face a problem.

Actually I believe insoluble in terms of its full adjustment. It seems to me met that we do not give greater consideration to this instrument which can make which can universalize the resources the limited resources of great teaching that we have now. That beginning a beginning has been made largely through the support and encouragement of the fund for the Advancement of education in the uses of television in the classroom. That are hundreds of schools across this country that are hundreds of universities in this country which are at present using television for educational purposes. But this is only the beginning of a very great movement which I believe is going to change the face of education. For one thing it is going to rid o teachers of one button that I and the rest of us have suffered under all our years of teaching. The fact that more is asked of us than we can possibly contribute. The burden

on us exceeds the time and energy that we have. Through television we can actually make a change in teaching which will rid us of this been through television we can divide the labor between partners in education and I've seen it happening in the schools. A great teacher or if there is no greater job the most competent teacher you can find you put before the television camera and his or her function is to present to students. It's within the range of the transmitter. The first row of the tripartite function of teaching and of Lenny. I say that the first business of a teacher is not the subject matter. To eliminate and clarify and vivify an idea or a principle or education. Ultimately it comes back to the clarification of principle to the training of students to learn how to think straight. And you only learn how to think

straight. As you reduce the innumerable phenomena of life to the dead principles a spell for teaching on television with all of visual resources that the medium adds to his individual power can give an exposition of a subject that bears down and clarifies a principle or an idea makes it vivid. With that job done we passed now to the partner in the classroom the classroom teacher now takes over and performs the second and third face is a true teaching and true learning as I see them. With the idea or the principle clarified the classroom teacher as now a separate function on which she can specialize. No longer burdened with the preparation of that lesson. She can concentrate on phases two and three. Phase two is now to get the children in that classroom to apply this principle in the context of that experience. You now get a class of children articulating their recognition of this

principle in the context of their lives. They exchange experiences they speak of it as it applies to them. The teacher is in fact not teaching but evoking the active response and thought of children in the classroom and no one learns of them as they articulate their own ideas and thoughts. Sit back and simply listen to a good teacher and you in a passive situation. The activation of the student mind is the essential. Second Step up a nanny. I say that the final fruition of true learning and true teaching occurs when the classroom bells ring for the end of class. If the first teacher has clarified and David died that principal effectively if in the classroom the children's minds have been activated they will go out of that classroom so fired in interest that they will carry it back out of school and into the home. It's a concern to pursue this problem further. This is where true education finally takes place this is the fruition of the learning process as it

becomes a matter of such true interest to you that it's part of the stuff of your living. Now you talk with your parents you talk with your friends. You go down into the basement and you take the temperature you go up into the attic and take the comparative temperature you apply what you have learnt. Television makes possible first the communication to students all over the place of the finest teaching that you can muster within your school system or for that matter in the nation. It enables us also to relieve teachers of this burden. I spoke enough to divide the labor. And by this means we can see. Time save time and pursue education at a faster pace than ever before. Now I speak of what I know here I'm not talking theoretically I've sat in schools all over this country where this is going on. And the achievements the evidence is cumulative and almost uniform that where you use television along these lines imaginatively the results in terms of children's achievement in every instance with the rarest exception

matches the achievement of students matched in terms of performance levels undergoing the same course wreck under conventional conditions and in some instances where the teaching is particularly fine. The television students outstrip. They are equivalents in the ordinary classroom. What you are proposing or supposing I suspect is true is a basic tenet of how education will operate would change the demands we would have for people entering the teaching profession business I suspect is a better word for it. We're so bound up now in education with methods of testing devices for determining strengths and weaknesses of people as if once these are identified they remain just the way they are and they never change and we work on these and we just work on them and work on them. And also on the other hand we keep saying people are changing creatures they're dynamic beings that today they're not like they were yesterday or a year ago. These two are very definitely in conflict

with each other these two ideas and yet there's a super imposition here of another group in which another idea another concept in which this doesn't have makes no meaning has no meaning at all because your if I am reading you right here you're saying that we have the present Haitian with all the advantages of the identification of the superb the teacher who is wrapped up knowledge of all the background necessary. And then we have the interplay between a group of people who have absorbed receive and then activate use this and carry this out into life as they live. None of the protesting or none of the devices that we've used in the past for Separation of people seem to make any sense in this concept. Do you agree that this is true or do you see a relationship between our traditional pattern of labeling people testing them and finding out where they should be in our educational system and then putting them out in the world and we think they've reached a certain level.

I think I agree with a certain qualification. I think that is a dangerous tendency in education as well as outside of it to fall victim to a circumstance that assails us. We suffer in almost every context of our society including education from the class of numbers. How do you deal with masses that tendency is to avail ourselves of that to which we are prone because our strength as a culture is in know how. So we devise tests and in the process are making tests the criteria of the true value and capacity of an individual. We tend toward the mechanisation of the individual. The test becomes the interest. Moment the cold blooded instrument by which you evaluate a human being. Now I'm not saying the tests have no value I think they have great value but I think at this stage we've got to take them with a considerable grain of salt.

I believe that well I won't say that I was going to say I believe that tests will never be able to encompass the subtleties and differences that constitute personality and ability. Certainly at this stage they can only make very crude measures of ability. They are in that sense fallible to the degree to which we are in thrall to testing as a measure of a man or of a student. We are in danger of instrumental eyes and instrumental eyes in that individual. And if anything has given me encouragement in the last few weeks it has been a report that with respect to college entrance which is played by the class of numbers and reduced in many instances to the evaluation of these tests the recognition has come that the tests are inadequate measures of ability and back into the college entrance examination has come the essay question.

Now the essay question although it takes an enormous time to read into a valuate index in the hands of a perceptive mind of the true educational attainment and intellectual capacities of an individual that all your tests put together. I speak exaggerated and perhaps that about in terms of response Joe question. It's the question I would introduce. There's been a great deal of technological expectation of people. There are so many things to do so many things that need doing which are of a technical nature now far more complex than 50 years ago. We have critics of education who come in and look at our educational system as it now stands from the context of what they remember when they were in school and no other context at all. This would be very much like walking out of the country store 50 years ago and walking into a modern supermarket today and telling you what's wrong with it without without having had any of the in-between steps and seen the growth and development of it. But this doesn't erase the problem. There are technical things which need to be done and we have a

responsibility in society for our own improvement our own growth our own life to see to it that these are done. You also indicated in the past and in our discussion here that there everyone you give the impression anyhow that everyone has something in which he can be a successful individual in our society. And the problem of education in this context would be to help that individual locate that area of success and provide him with the necessary experiences so that he can achieve success in this field. Now I think you see where I'm coming with this proposition you are putting forth here that we have this mass of material which is presented by the very best people we can find and then it's developed into an individual basis in the our local classrooms or whatever they may be listening Garvie doing groups maybe I don't know what you might want to call them. How do you see the development and the growth of individual successes within this context especially in light of

technical developments technical things we need doing that need doing in our society. Would you react to that. Well I think I can at least attempt to answer your question because you've raised a very important and real point. To start with it is perfectly evident that the range of competence is required of students by the modern technological world we live in is vastly extended and there is no doubt that knowledge and acquaintance and even technical proficiency in the various sciences is a new accented point. So I would say First with respect to the curriculum of our schools. They've got to be broadened to embrace for just about every student at least an awareness of the world of modern science. The way to transform da thinking and to provide for those who have aptitude specialized training for the

technological world into which they're going to go and which they can set. So point number one would be the curriculum has got to be revised to bring science into the context of people's overall perspective. To a greater degree than has been done in the past in the past we've tended to speak of the humanities on one side and science and technology on the other. This has got to change. The humanist has got to embrace science as part as an understanding of humanism. The scientist and the technologist has got to understand science more fully. But he likewise has got to understand more about what Humanism means. This leads me to a second conclusion. Given the added burden and respecting of the curriculum within the time limits that we have for teaching children the simple fact is we don't have time enough. From this I would conclude one necessary reform. We have got to extend the period of education. More and more students are

coming into college but at the same time as the numbers increase the effect is to lower the general standards of higher education. This does no good. Actually the demands of employment allow us to defer people's entry into life. I would say that for those who have aptitude to go on to college we need to expand extend the period of education by two three or even four years so that the youngster starts later in life. This is to provide room for this new element of education relating to technology and science as part of the competence is required of modern man. Before we think of technical training let us remember what I said about know how and be how. It's no good turning out technicians who Aha men with respect to humanism. These dehumanised present and will not serve us well. The power we have over Nature today is a terrifying power capable of good and of evil and to

see that our eye rather than the perspective of true humanism is to risk disaster. The atomic bomb is but one example of many of how mastery of knowledge can bring us to disaster. That's why I say we must extend education on the one hand and in its earliest stages do more than we are doing to engender a sense of what it means to be. In other words that the humanities must figure out logically and longer than they do now and defer technical training until the humanistic process has taken place. But I think if I had to round out what I have to say in this I would put it again in the language of Whitehead who warned us that as I go. We in our culture as yet have not recognised the central lity and significance of trained intelligence the intellect is

almost always a term of abuse or of derision. We've added to the vocabulary by speaking of the intellectual as an egghead. The Russians have taught us a lesson here unless we recognize the importance of intelligence and humane intelligence. All the education that we do and particularly all the technical training that we will build will be of no value to us at all. And why to put it into a phrase and I think with this if you will allow me I would like to conclude. And he said it 30 years ago and we haven't spotted it and recognized it and applied it yet. He said in the conditions of modern life the rule is absolute. The race that does not value trained intelligence is doomed. What we have got to rediscover is the meaning and the context of trained intelligence and make this the basis of our educational theory and practice. Rivals or allies. The future relationship of the mass media and education as

described by Mr. Charles Slepian chairman of the Department of Communications and education at New York University Mr Siegman was interviewed by Dr. Jansen Taro Michigan State University College of Education. Next week a defense of America's teachers will be made by Mr. Norman Cousins editor of The Saturday Review of literature. Oral essays on education is produced by Wayne S. Wayne and Patrick Ford distribution is made to the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the end E.B. Radio Network. Form. Made.