Everybody's mountain; 13; The Final One-Hour Broadcast

Education by one definition aspires to the fullest development of all individuals and it is at the same time a tension and a splendor in society that all human beings are richly diversified in potential and in handicap. Evanston Township has an unlikely program for the mentally handicapped. A reporter for a Chicago newspaper who lives in Evanston has been unable to find any expensive private school. The right combination of social vocational and academic education which he found for his mentally handicapped son in Evanston public schools Mr. Lewis. Why do you feel that Evanston programme for the mentally handicapped is the school's obligation. The problem posed by a handicapped individual is not only very individuals problem or the problem of his family but it's a problem of society. Unless the potential of the individual is taken into account and some provision is made to enable him to realise his potential then this individual becomes a drag not only on his family and on himself but on the whole community.

Evanston is mentally handicapped students are not shunted off the educational line when they reach the compulsory age limit. They share the activities of the average children they learn at their own rates of speed and they are given job guidance and training to equip them for competent adult life. Mr. Lewis your son Jonathan is 15 and a sophomore at Evanston high. Do you have any vocational plans for him when he finishes school. But not yet and not at this age. We feel that he should be in high school until he completes his senior year sometime in the junior and senior year. It will be more possible to tell what he can do well this extra two years employment because in some cities a program for the mentally handicapped terminates after the first two years. That's true in many studies which have a program at all in high school. Have it only for two years until the child is 16 years old and then eligible under most state laws to work and belong to Jonathan's days in high school the better it will be for him.

Very very definitely. The more education he can acquire the better equipped he is to get out and shift for himself. One example of the consequences of meeting the special needs of the exceptional child is a tall blonde husky young suffer more in Evanston highs mentally handicapped program. He is a member of the school swimming team. His coach is Dobbie But from a big can champion from the University of Michigan. W When did you meet Tom. Well I met him last year ago in November when he tried out for our swimming team here. What specialty did you start him out. Well we started mountain across stroke. And then we switched over about Christmas time into the butterfly breaststroke. Why did you switch. Well you seem to have great flexion his legs his arms his arms on the water very difficult to have a little natural ability. How about a demonstration. TIME Do a couple with butterfly breaststroke for me. Wow this is time stroking his butterfly breaststroke and

all he has very strong shoulders and terrific flexion is like Tom boasted himself out of the pool and came over to us. Are you enjoying being on the swim team. It's really a lot of fun to do. With the group I think is a finance coach in the country. What about your academic program what do you study to English. Are you getting vocational guidance. Yeah you know about anything in particular. Well I don't know what I want to be after Tom's initial training you put him in the freshman division of the suburban leagues with me. How do you make up. Well at first he was defeated. But as the year went along he started winning more of a man. And in our championship the band were all the school's beat time a one that had a 50 yard butterfly and set a new record for this event. This summertime worked for me as a lifeguard. Fine country club on the north shore here. What are you proud of me and for we're going to move him up to the virus to this year is going to jump right over that sophomore division because he's way ahead of the sophomores and I think it's going to be a fine addition on that varsity team.

I. Could go on and become a very good prospect for the Olympic team. Maybe not in 1960 but in 1964. Brilliant students in small rural high schools in the United States are often handicapped by the lack of teachers who are competent to give them advanced instruction especially in the math and sciences. In Oklahoma Dr. Merrill W. Glasgow is director of state education television. He supervises a project begun by the frontis of Science Foundation of Oklahoma to bring TV causes in the sciences and mathematics to small rural schools. Why do you consider this important Dr. Glasgow a brilliant child in a rural area is entitle to the same potential development that he would get if he were in Oklahoma City or Bartlesville or any other large place. Are you native of Oklahoma. I was born here on a farm and I have taught in a small rural high schools and I've been superintendent of some small schools. You know how much this means to the small community.

I think I do because when I taught in a small high school I had to teach some subjects that I would really wasn't qualified to teach but I probably knew as much or more than anyone else and somebody had to take some so I did and that's still going on. The front tiers of Science Foundation of Oklahoma is an organization of leading businessmen actively working to lift the level of the state's entire educational operation. Dean a president of the Kerr-McGee oil industries is the foundation's president. What is the tendency Mr. Magee among business men in this country which the frontiers of science foundation seems to be reversing in Oklahoma. I think the tendency among business men has been to let the educators do the educating and they have not concern themselves too much about the educational process as I certainly have more intimate knowledge offering of help and cooperation. Producer surprising results of an improving educational you're not suggesting that the businessmen become the educators. Oh no no and we have been very careful in

our foundation to lead educating to the educators. All we have done is to try to spotlight or pinpoint the needs and stimulate people into doing something about it in the state. Braun of the great land run Oklahoma's Frente is a Science Foundation discovered that education's run is always on. That nobody enters the 20th century social order of science technology innovation and research except through the door of the little red schoolhouse which the pioneers built and promptly neglected. Dean McGee believes that Oklahoma's business leaders have come to education to stay. Is science your only frontier Mr. McGee. What do you have frontiers in education beyond that. Oh yes our goal of course is to improve teaching generally. While it's true that science and mathematics are the priority subject at the moment who knows five years from now it might be the humanities or biology or some other equally important thing the public schools of Atlanta Georgia have an outstanding program for the education of

blind children. It is administered by IRA Jarrow the only woman superintendent of a large city public school system in the United States. What is the south record Miss Jarrott in the education of its handicapped children handicapped children have not gotten a break particularly in the south we haven't been set up to train these children. But they have a right to training more so than the average joe their average child is going to get it anyway and everybody is teaching to the average John and now they're beginning to disappear readjust. But they handicapped it cost a great deal more money to educate ahead capture a lot of critics of the public school system say that money is in the hands of a lot of money is being wasted on frills in our educational system what about that. Well you would have to define a Freo and sometimes they define a frill is physical education and sometimes they define it as athletics and sometimes it's even been defined as foreign language in elementary schools and now sense. But make the definition of a free always changing considerably.

The government of Atlanta's education of the blind is a job a home and the ability to accept the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship. The method is the integration of the blind children in the city schools where the sight of children. Linda Westbrook is a blind third grader in a class of 27 cited children in the Joel Chandler Harris elementary school. Her teacher is Mrs. Dix. Now twice Let's go over our new words in Spanish and this week. First word we have is how you can jam a part of football yes turn this apology keek spam or football then ever. What can I work on Pioneer. Can you give us a good sense of the law I can play. But no I'm not asking a question.

Do you know how to play. Let's write those two sentences. My second wife put. Linda's fingers poking at the keys of her Braille writer. I bought one illustration of a variety of special devices and services provided by Atlanta to enable the blind child to share the normal context of public school education. Linda Westbrook is eight years old. If it weren't for the integrated program her parents would have had to send her to the state residential school in Macon. Because of the program she is where her family wants her to be at home and going to school with her sighted friends. One of Linda's special teachers in Atlanta is off. He was born blind. Author What about the next generation. What will happen if integrated education for the blind becomes more pervasive in America's public schools. When today is school children are adults. Particularly in the end. Well

the job of selling blind persons to employers be eased. If. Those employers have been in school with blind children there is a great deal for people to learn about blind person's limitations and also about their potentialities. Chicago's Dunbar vocational high school is a gleaming freewheeling concrete steel and glass eight million dollar investment in instruction for immediate employment after graduation. It is a notable example of a meaningful imaginative approach to vocational education. Dr. Benjamin S. Well as is the general superintendent of schools in Chicago. Is employability Dr. Willis the end all of Dunbar's vocational program for its students. It isn't sufficient to just work to run a machine. These people can and should have an opportunity for a thorough programme of education. And valving understanding the culture of the past of the present

and contribute to its future. Therefore in this vocational school the programme involves Fine Arts English history social studies math and science and I would suggest that many of these courses are more effectively taught than in some other schools because there is always the opportunity to see their use. In relation to the subject itself. In this school many more young people will be reached who would not be reached through any other type of problem. The director of Dunbar High is Neil F.. Simeon the parents of his students have traditionally known only the unskilled labor market. Dunbar Hi Mr. Simeon makes its students employable with dignity in a society of increasing technological complexity. How would you define Dunbar's brand of vocational education. Simply stated a vocational education is alive right through our programme we give the boys and girls the skills the related

technical knowledge and information and they know how in terms of social industrial relationships to make them competent efficient workers 10 percent of Dunbar's graduates according to the school's director go on to college. Of the remaining 90 percent of all that are successfully placed in skilled jobs within four weeks after graduation. What is the significance of this Mr Simeon to your community. A number of years ago graduates of the schools look to the community to help them. Now they are able to give themselves as they go out as competent workers they become economically secure and have a stake in the affairs of the community and an interest in the Destiny and affairs of our city. In other words this kind of education. It makes them givers not takers right. In Flint Michigan each year the Charles Stuart Mark foundation makes available to the Board of Education approximately one million dollars for

supplementary educational recreational and cultural programs not provided for by public taxes. The director of the MARC Foundation Board of Education Program in Flint is Dr. Frank J memy. Many years ago Frank when you were a high school football coach at Flint you tried to control juvenile delinquency with a program of recreation. What did you find out. We found out in an awfully fast hurry you can't correct a boy or a girl that congenital surface with a bone or a bat. We know that. We also know that we can do a lot of these other things where you have broken homes or prostitution or you have drunkenness and that sort of thing. You can't do too much with that boy unless you work and the total family friends from your love for meeting the special needs of its mentally physically emotionally and opportunity handicapped children is the Community School idea. What is the Community School idea Frank.

We get the parents into the school and they meet with the teachers and the children themselves too. And we sit down and we find out what all of our common problems are. Just what are the needs. What what's wrong. As well as what's right there over here we look and say what are our resources here in Flint. And every instance we found out that the school the community school was a focal point for the instrument. But it isn't any good unless you have real Democratic leadership to head it up. Frank what is the real educational discovery you've made in Flint when a community and you boil it down to your elementary Community School District. When you bring the people together in that area and you have all these different resources to meet these particular problems then you begin to find out that the Catholic the Jew the Protestant doesn't have her mourns or that the labor and management can get along. The colored and white can get along. We

know that they can get along. And until you change the attitudes and remove the barriers of ignorance indifference prejudice hatred then you can have some chance of having your resources come to bear upon your problems. On the mountaintops of education the indispensable phenomenon of the radioactivity and for a lot of the high quality teacher. No problem of the schools is a more serious concern than how to attract quality teachers to the daily firing line of the classroom and keep them there at any given time. Nearly half of the children in the United States are being taught by inexperienced and largely unsupervised teachers. This statement was made by Francis Keppel dean of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Dean Keppel. The most obvious solution to this problem that has been proposed is to double our teacher's salaries. What do you think about that.

Well of course as an educator I'm in favor of doubling all salaries any way that seems a sensible procedure. But if you ask me as a politician My answer is I don't think you can get away with it. The effect of doubling the salaries at the present time would be to double the salaries of both those who spend only a few years in the schools and those who are making a career argument. Now the purpose of course of doubling salaries is to keep first rate people in the profession and that's obviously sensible. But if you have as high a percentage of relatively young women entering the profession as we do and you double their salaries The net result is for them to go out and buy prettier dresses and get married faster. If the educators propose doubling salaries I think they have to show a very much higher rate of retention of career people in the profession. Then the public may be prepared to double the top salaries. Mike Kevorkian teaches science in the Miami public schools. He loves to teach but I've nearly a 40 $500 a year job teaching couldn't hold him. What does keep him teaching in Miami is the city's

experiment in the use of television to fight the facility shortage and to spread the influence of the high quality teacher. Mike you were one of the original teachers who audition successfully for TV instruction. You've been facing the educational cameras for two years. How do you feel about television teaching. Well TV has opened up a new world in education for me. I find that there are so many interesting things that can be done on television that can't be done in the classroom. Boys and girls in the classroom have to stand up to see demonstrations going on in the front of a classroom. But with a television camera and a television screen we could take a simple experiment like taking potassium permanganate and some glycerin the size of a quarter and putting it together and causing a chemical reaction with the magic of TV we can blow it up to the size of a 21 inch television screen. When you taught your regular class before you became a TV teacher did you feel that you had enough time to prepare your lessons adequately. Well no I didn't. But with television we have more of an opportunity to plan more

completely for each individual lesson that is being taught. We're always bringing in resource people films from various places. A once in a while we even take the boys and girls on a mass field trips 200 300 strong. Where do you get your specimens. A lot of the specimens I bring in myself I go right out into the water just before our program and bring up a shark or bring up some sea squirts or sea urchins or whatever it might be that having to do with our clan and you bring them fresh into the classroom. Oh yes. Television it is assumed will keep the quality teacher teaching especially among men because it offers higher financial rewards as well as educational excitement and prestige. To the problem of the quality teacher Harvard has another solution. In capital under the present arrangements. Essentially what the graduate schools of education offer to young men this is what I have to say and I'm a recruiter that's one of the things the deans of schools of education do I suppose. I find myself saying to an able and vigorous young man of twenty one look come into the teaching business is just wonderful.

You start teaching at the age of 21 with a class of 25 or 30 and when you retire at the age of sixty six forty five years later you're doing exactly the same thing it's one of the most exciting professions you've ever heard of. Actually of course I've exaggerated because many of the men in her administration system principals principals superintendents and the like and there is in fact sense upward mobility. But unfortunately it means that there isn't much within the actual direct relationship with the students. The inadequacy of this recruitment message is apparent. Most of the male college graduates choose law or engineering medicine or commerce as a career rather than teaching. In addition to this Dean couple hasn't there also been a drain off of women from the teaching profession. That's right. In the last 10 years the marriage age of young women has gone down from something like 23 to something like 21 and please don't hold me to the figures but it's about two year reduction. This means that if they enter teaching and marry the length of time that the young women spend actually teaching in the classroom is

relatively less than it was 10 or 20 years ago. This means obviously that more replacements are needed. There was a period there are 950 when there were predictions that the public schools would need 150000 new teachers a year. And how many graduates come out of the colleges annually at that time it was somewhere around three hundred twenty five thousand if my memory is right. This meant obviously that somewhere between a third and a half of all of college graduates of every kind of college would be needed for the schools assuming that you got all your teachers from that source. Well with the competition from all the other walks of life this was a ridiculous situation there was no likelihood of meeting the teacher needs from this source only what is the solution then to getting the proper share of the best minds of each generation particularly among men into career teaching. The most direct solution would appear to be. An effort to see whether within the present scheme of public education a career line can be worked out which moves from

induction into teaching to some experience as a teacher and then to increased responsibility right now in the public schools each teacher is very much on his own whether he started teaching this year or has been teaching 30 years in a Harvard experiment at Lexington Massachusetts and entire elementary school is being operated by teams of Teachers which are hierarchies. Each team has clerical aides and part time teaching assistants. Above them are regular teachers senior teachers and team leaders. The classes cut across grade levels and the teams plan their lessons collectively. Assuming Dean kept all the team teaching is successfully demonstrated what will it do to the salary schedules of teachers. Let's suppose that you have at the top of the Teacher Salary Range in a community six to seven thousand dollars a year. It would seem to me reasonable to hope that if the scheme worked you would have a situation where those reaching the most responsible teaching positions would be ten to twelve thousand dollars. At least

I would hope to be in that order of magnitude. Those salaries would not be reached by everybody that's obvious. The high quality teacher is well-trained. He has a mastery of his subject. He has been through the ASM and his own education is never finished but the high quality teacher is something more than an efficient intellectual machine. Even Pearson is a teacher in Evanston the mentally handicapped program. Before you came to Evanston Miss Pearson you visited many schools in the Western Midwest to get some idea of their philosophy of special education. What did you find in one state. Their program was around what I would term as babysitting. They kept their students busy copying material which they couldnt possibly have understood. And part of the time they would do janitorial work around the school and I just can't see spending my time teaching in a school where I would not be permitted to attempt to teach the students

something. And what did you find. And it Evanston attracted you and made you want to participate in its work. When I was interviewed I was very particular in wanting to know how do you screen these students for the program. Do you have a good screening program. And they did and I want to know about the girls well they are interested in the students having some academic background. They want to educate them to their fullest ability. That's what I'm interested in. Well he's teaching. A job a quarterly a professional career. A group of elementary and secondary school teachers and administrators. I answered the question at a summer session of the University of Colorado. They had come from almost every state for advanced courses in education. Professor Ernest O Mel B my distinguished educational consultant for this series was one of the visiting teachers. In Dr. Mel B class on current criticisms of American

education. I asked them why they came into teaching and why they stayed. Here are some of their answers with Professor Mel B answering last. I believe the teaching is a calling just like the ministry and should be treated as such. Good clean work and it helps you to keep. If I say I enjoy teaching I'm also saying I enjoy being a janitor social worker babysitter and sometimes a teacher and I do. I have taught for 15 years that tired of being poor and went into bed and after that situation I came back into teaching and I would not stay in until I retired. It's the type of work that you're tired at the end of the day but enthused when you get up in the morning. I began teaching during the Depression because I was hungry. I'm still hungry but it's for more teaching. I'm very fond of teaching to the extent that I have five daughters who are teachers have it right beside me who's a teacher I teach not to teach they

also barefoot in mountaineering but because I enjoy it and I can see the change that takes place from the beginning of time until the life I come from a family of teachers from the environment and I didn't know there was any other profession till I was 21 years old. I love kids and I became a teacher because through working children and teachers and people in the community I discovered for the first time in my life the real meaning of freedom of democracy. I saw the power of faith in people. I saw what happened to children when you respected them and gave them a chance to be themselves. And I saw the power of love in human relations and saw the building of a warm hearted human brotherhood as the only way out of the world's troubles. Veteran Russell said the obstacles to a stable scientific society are neither physical not technical. The root of the matter. Russell declared his

love for compassion. If you feel this you have a motive for existence a guide in action. A reason for courage and imperative necessity for intellectual honesty. The high quality teacher must care. But for all our wealth scholarship insights are stratagems. We will never get enough high quality teachers into our public schools unless we the citizen taxpayers re-examine many of our obsolete assumptions about the role of the teacher in our society. At Harvard Illinois Stanford and other universities the leaders among the scholars are probing the academic moons of public school education. In Atlanta Oklahoma City Evanston Flint Chicago and elsewhere outstanding school systems are reaching out on the ever widening launching pads of public education to encompass compassionately the highest potential Hobbits of all children. In communities throughout the land

individual philanthropists and giant foundations are supporting the operational thrusts of education space age. But the conquest of the limitless frontiers will never come unless the average citizen at the levels of local state and federal government is prepared to give American education the top most priority demanded of it by the 20th century. Education is your mountain to. Your children's Mountain your neighbor's mountain. Education is everybody's mountain. The recorded series everybody's mountain was written and produced by Robert Louis Shea on for the Educational Television and Radio Center. The programs are distributed by the National Association of educational broadcasters. The series consultant was Dr. Ernest O MELBY professor of education at Michigan State University and former dean of education at New York University. This is the NEA E.B. Radio Network.