Oral essays on education; Dr. Margaret Mead

The following tape recorded program is distributed through the facilities of the National Association of educational broadcasters. 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 and Tara Michigan State University College of Education. Interviews Dr. Margaret Mead well-known anthropologist and author in her second appearance in the series to determine if education can change. And now here is Dr tinder. Where is the greatest motivation for change in our educational system coming from if you will agree with me that there is a change going on. Is it coming from teacher training institutions or is it coming from public pressure on teacher training instruction or on schools where is it coming from and how do how do you see our

construct our activities in this. Really I think the greatest pressures are. I mentioned this was some hesitation but I would think primarily come from the general climate of opinion in the country that is that the people of community X are more likely to be asking questions now about their school. I mean what are we doing about this. What's our mathematics program like. How do our children measure up physically. When national tests are announced and American children are supposed to be defective how many children from our school are winning a National Science Award in the science fairs. How do our teachers salaries compare with other communities that all of these questions now tend to be stimulated on the positive side. In a nationally communicated ideas people read an article in harbors or

they read a Life magazine study that compares a Russian schoolboy with an American schoolboy and then they begin to ask questions that the impetus has been on the whole national bus from inside the big educational institutions like taps for instance these special commissions that bring in the curriculum advisors from every state and has come from well inst institutions educational institutions for instance the new physics program is centered at MIT and there's a deep commitment from the people who are going to teach students from the public schools that they want them taught different things. I think that what we're having is local response to nationally created climates of opinion if pressures are coming from localities to change education.

Are these pressures being put upon the area within our educational most set up which can best perform the function of changing education. And what is that area. Well of course in the end you can have national conferences and you can make up new plans for every kind of school system. But as you said before it has to be lived out in a classroom and has to be lived out in a local community with all the facilities that the community has of every sort. Now one of the really disturbing things that's been happening for I found for instance. I visited a magnificent school in a western state. It was really related to the whole community when they had a conference the secretaries and the county education office were invited to the conference which is a very good sign you're dealing with something that doesn't look like an Indian caste system or a Hitler Youth Movement which is most of our schools tend to look like very often in their hierarchical arrangements. This was excellent and they were even aware of all the things that were happening. They

were aware of the different backgrounds of the different groups of children in the community. Teachers were on their toes they'd come there from other states and were enjoying it. And I was very much impressed I spent a day with them in a lovely big room where the seats weren't screwed down and there was a fire in the fireplace. And then I said What are you doing. To translate what you've done so it's available for the rest of the country and they said We're doing our best to have no one hear about it because look what happened in Pasadena. We don't want our school system wrecked. Now this is a counter trend in this country where each small community may get to work to do experiments of all kinds and important experiments experiments with work programs for children experiments with supervised work programs in the summer which is maybe going to replace the kind of dreadful casual labor we

have with all its implications. But they're afraid of being attacked they're afraid of the groups in this country who are fixed on the schools as a scapegoat so that instead of each pilot situation each invent local invention being fed up and back. Into the national picture so that other people can copy it. I think they were not getting anything like the rewards we should be getting from local experimentation today. We've concentrated rather heavily on their school organization and its implications and construct what other institutions exist in our society which put pressures of an educational nature upon the community as a whole. As you see our society and let me ask you a double barreled question here are we unique in this too or are expectations different from that of other societies who are as complex or nearly as complex as we are.

Well I'm not quite sure about the word pressure. For instance if you take a museum. Now the important thing about a museum is that it's just there. Of course sometimes we make our school children go to it in great groups and this and then the museum is rewarded because it's part of the educational system again you can count the children. But. And that's pressure but that's part of the education system. But otherwise a museum simply stands there with its doors open and with all sorts of things inside ready for anyone who walks in they can follow any path. They can go and look at dinosaurs are our heads or something that's been made. On the other side of the globe or a bit of old geology they can roam around. It's a place in the community where the individual is free. To learn. But the learning is provided which is quite different from institutions where the individual is forced to learn so that the

whole battery of voluntary organizations museums in all the different shapes shown in museums and art galleries zoos nobody has to go to a zoo as it was a place where they want to go and where we can foster an interest in animals and natural history and all sorts of things so that another great part of them. Our general educational cultural picture is in these institutions and of course the same thing is true of libraries. There again nobody makes the child go and get the book he wants to read but the book is there. This is an another big segment. And then of course we have the segment that we think of as commercial a movie have US television radio where these two things interact where on the one hand you are free to go or not. And you don't have to

enter the movie house you know have a look at the TV set. But on the other hand there are tremendous pressures on what on what you can see when you get there. So it's an intermediate area where it's very hard for well any local group to affect very much what happens to their children and what choice they're offered where the only possibility for the either the questing student or the parent is refuse. But there's very little chance for them to make any kind of positive choices. What about values. When society sets certain values for its educational activities and these values there seems to be a trend tendency to transfer these values into political activities and not transfer them they seem to be the same values political activities and in the values that are ascribed to things such as those you've been labeling museums and libraries and our galleries and so on and in areas of communication or

transposition of information. Are we unique in the United States in taking these values and permeating them throughout. Now I don't think we do permeate our schools are just supposed to be uniformly idealistic and conformist. Certainly our picture of politics is not any school system that taught a realistic picture of politics based on the daily newspaper for the preceding 12 months all the teachers would be fired. Our schools are supposed to present only one part of life. Children in school are supposed to be much better behaved than the same age. Young people who are out or working or who are married. Many schools put people out when they're married because they can't conform to the same standards they could before and I think that we tend to very much to keep things in boxes. I mean museums in my

barriers in art galleries they're fine. But well maybe they're nice to take children to and one went there when I was a kid and one doesn't go again until one has kids. Certainly business is not expected to have the same set of values which is so that at present we have a system that impinges on the growing individual. And by growing individual I mean everybody who's Senshi in a century and up to 90. In very different ways in which we we put formal education in one box and. Cultural activities. It's about that other kind of culture you know spelt with a capital C in another and then the expediencies in realities of the real world where culture has no value except as an advertising medium or something of the sort. And it's still a third. And this is one of the problems of course that we

in our schools we really do not encourage artistes we encourage children to play well in the school band but not to be musicians. We encourage people to write for the school paper and learn the gift of gab but we view with alarm 14 year old or 15 year old who says he's going to be a poet. We we give no complete support. We have no national theater. Most musicians in this country have to work as bank clerks or bank guards and hope to have time to do a little composing on the side if they do it so that we give extraordinarily little genuine support. As the richest nation in the world to those parts of life which we normally think of as a value created. And this is even true in the realm of religion. We build buildings and we set up churches

with all sorts of again welfare's facilities health facilities ways of taking over some of the things that used to be done individually but we don't give very deep support to anyone who wanted to give their lives to meditation. Shear only to the spiritual life. We don't value that much more than we value sheerly educational life. Today we expect a college president to also be a public figure to operated 40 different levels to be a fundraiser. This intolerance in the sense of concentrated specialization at the top of it. Whether it is the great teacher or the great preacher or the great artist and it tends to make you continually insist that people take over a lot of success functions that

the model their role. Now this may come from the fact that we have in the past separated these things so rigid. Where is this leading us. Were we going to end up following this pattern that you've identified here. What can we expect our society to be in the future if we continue this will. At present we're creating a society which places such a low value on dedication and sacrifice on commitment and actually on any genuine commitment to future generations. Where we're creating a society of rather low level goodness and a society in which we're beginning to separate out more and more the except yours which is roughly speaking I suppose 90 percent of the society who conform completely and give lip service at least to the values that we preach part of the time

and a rebel group or two rebel groups I think it's necessary to distinguish the juvenile delinquent with the people we call juvenile delinquents who for whom the system doesn't work and they're helpless and they respond by truancy and and vagrancy and vandalism and petty crime until we've stigmatized them so they have no chance or hope. And the beat generation who again are resigning from society are resigning without any goals or without any aspirations because we don't the society as it stands today in this country. We do not permit ourselves really to envisage any order of change. We don't permit ourselves to think about being a better society than we are now. I think this is explained. We don't really you know we're just going to be more mechanized. Possibly we may have more automation or more this or

greater gross national income. That's not a real changes the SAT. And then we can paint pictures and do that there's going to be standing room only the whole country is going to be covered by roads that we won't have the doctors or the hospitals. So 20 years from now we won't be discussing women having their babies in the hospital. There won't be any hospitals any nurses or any doctors to look after them and things of that sort we can paint do. We're led to bank that as a way in which we you know get the next hospital built or something or the next medical school in doubt where dad do to paint pictures of disasters of various sorts of disasters. But we're not at present allowed to advocate any kind of really radical change because the advocacy of radical change now has become identified with treason. This is true in this country it's true in the Soviet Union and it's true in undoubtedly in China that we don't know enough about that as countries around the world have become

polarized in relationship to each other. Change in your own country ceases to be a prophetic vision of your own country's future and instead is interpreted as helping the other countries because the other country is very likely to grab whatever it is you don't like. We have no divisive press by which we can offer any kind of great idealism. Suppose you come along and talk about the fact that we ought to ought to have more provision for the Arts in this country that we're now the richest country in the world the average citizen has more energy it is disposal of the neuro had. That and seven percent of the population of the world in North America are using up 50 percent of our irreplaceable natural resources. Now the thing that the richest country in the world owes to the world is the development of such a civilization at its top. So that we are we ought to be

producing the greatest facilities for the yardstick that is sold is for science the greatest exploration in the behavioral sciences which should be available in the world. If however you advocate for instance underwriting writing the arts have been in this country somebody will immediately quote the Soviet Union that's what we do. Therefore it's the wrong thing for us to do. Just as in the Soviet Union if anybody advocates more voluntary choice and more opportunity to starve if you want to while you're being a poet that is wicked capitalist propaganda. So that we're deadlocked at present in systems that keep each other down because each one and then if eyes any desire for change as being political treason and helping the enemy and certainly in this country. Young Americans aren't anxious to help the enemy. And if any kind of extreme idealism. And if you don't have

extreme idealism you don't get any. There is a dent it tends to be identified with some kind of lack of love of their country or disloyalty. We put a sort of a damper on imagination and on dedication and the whole system gets bogged down underneath this because without vision the people perish. Our present great vision is to balance the budget in one form or another have the make the job that you get fit the payments that you'll have to make on the house for the next 30 years. You know this is part of our society as it is now identified. It certainly is an inevitable that this is the way it will remain as a static operation such as this is it. No not if enough people object she because we have a system that's extremely responsive. This is I think

one of our our major strengths is that anywhere in America three people can form a committee to fix anything. And on the whole at least used to have the sense of creativeness and more responsibility and more autonomy so that they could do it so that we do feel we can tackle any problem. We used to feel another. The real danger is that reducing that feeling. People are afraid to organize today on the whole quite just because they've been penalized for organizing they've been penalized for being associated with groups and people who join the group after they did. And how can you tell who's going to join something after you join it. So we have I think considerable fear of organized effort and an increasing sense of the helplessness of the individual which is probably the most serious thing that as we get more and more of a natural national picture so we get our population trends

ahead of the need for school buildings ahead in the need for roads ahead and medical students and all of these things. Each individual that feels more helpless because although responding to a national climate of opinion in many ways is good but they feel they can't influence and that things are being done to them by the day. And this is probably also being increased by the number of the second generation not necessarily in the sense of second generation Europeans but second generation city dwellers second generation. Educated people the tremendous amount of mobility from people who live very limited lives to people who live a little less limited lives and simply get enough education to learn to think they've learned that you can't do anything yourself that what you do is to find a little tiny place in the maze and you take this course and that course and that leads

to this and you get a certificate as a teacher or you get a certificate or something else and then you get a job and then you hold on to it in this structure that they look at as if they were looking at from the bottom of a big can get only see the three neck cells in the honeycomb. But how do you see the top cell in a honeycomb. How do you look at the whole car. In this however other society has done this in the past or is this a given as well but nobody has ever been no society's ever been up against what a society is up against today. Now this doesn't mean I discourage comparison of course because we learn a great deal from looking at other societies but at present I think we're tending to say Look at Rome she fell and did not do very much more with it. And it's important to realize that no society has ever faced the problems that face any society in the modern world today. Now how you look at the whole whole honeycomb she said there we look at the whole when it

comes to get outside. You can't see that having him from the inside. So that our greatest hope today is being able to see our society as a whole which means being able to get outside it. Look at what's happening in other societies. Look at what's happened in societies in the past to the extent it's relevant and get a view of the whole. One of the serious things that's happened in our self-criticism in the last few years and we love self-criticism because the way to make a book we really popular is to say something seemingly disagreeable about America. And this whole series of books that have been developed which have emphasized the organization and the ex-urban I stay to see. Here's the other directed men whole group of people who have done critical and acute surveys of parts of our society is that they have lacked both historical and cross-cultural perspective. They've been one piece of us criticizing another piece of us instead of

seeing the whole of developing American culture as one of many cultures. And then seeing the problems we face as new but is shared with other countries because of the period we belong and I think we're myopic at present exceedingly myope. We're just as in the atom bomb sort of and the Soviet Union which we turn into any kind of a bogey that will make us do whatever we think. One part of us thinks the other part I would do is to give money to the emerging market forces. Well this again is one requires I think more or less self selected prophets. We are of course becoming in with our increasing psychological knowledge we're becoming increasingly wary of prophets.

We keep trying to create conditions work from which people can speak. The office of a college president is one of the positions that we've created in our society of people who are expected and have a right to make pronouncements on many issues. The only trouble is we also ask them the right to manage a hundred million dollar outfit while they're doing it which is a little wearing. There are of course certain status is the commentary the responsible commentator again is someone who from whom we expect a certain order a responsible statement. But there is the increasing tendency to mechanize all these things. To ghost write speeches for editors and publishers to decide what they want written. The one way of course is not to get a book published today is to want to write. That is almost fatal. But the one way not to

be given the voice you want is to want it. If the whole of the system really is organized to prevent anybody who wants to say anything from saying and to pay people who don't particularly want to say it to say instead we've got a very curious distortion of initiative in this country. If it is known that you would like to work overseas you know a man who has a real interest in doing international work. He has hardly any hope of being employed. Meanwhile federal agencies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to persuade people who don't want to go overseas to go and we have a present I think a kind of paralysis of initiative because we have have created a system in which only the people who don't want to do something are regarded as the people who should do it. Whole countries trying to do some kind of a draft in which people should

only be drafted for things but never should say I'm willing to do it I'm willing to lead. I would like to write this book. I would like to say this over the air. I believe that children should be taught this. I would like to develop a new curriculum for something. The slightest indication genuine complete individual initiative is distrust as some kind of strange selves and instead we trust the system. If you don't want to make a broadcast everybody wants you to make it. But if you stood in the middle of Times Square and said I would like to speak over every radio station in this country or just the thing that they're trying to persuade you you never be asked to. So when you say who's going to do it it's it is open to question whether the people that play hard to get are the ideal prophet. So the prophecy realm shifts in a sense to the

entrepreneurs like yourselves that you take the responsibility for setting up situations in which people are asked to do something without themselves taking the initiative. Now I dare say one put that in but I say it just to see the possibilities of educational change have been explored by Dr. Margaret Mead and her apologist author and associate curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History. In her second appearance on the series Dr. maid was interviewed by Dr. Jameson Taro of the Michigan State University College of Education. Mr. William Benton publisher and chairman of the Encyclopedia Brittanica and next week's guest says that we have a new challenge in education and this new challenge must be met with new techniques. Join us next week for this interesting interview. Or less A's on education was produced by Wayne S. Wayne and Patrick Ford distribution is Major the National Association of educational broadcasters. This is the end

E.B. radio next. May.