At Issue; 64; The Job Corps

Any tea, an issue, job cause. Take one. The following program is from NET, the National Educational Television Network. 40 miles from New York City, past stark refineries and smoldering trash heaps. A bus approaches one of those vast 20th century centers for processing human beings into soldiers or refugees. Between wars and catastrophes, they are virtually abandoned and until January 12, 1965, so was Camp Kilmer.

On that date, it became something quite different, a sort of launching site for human futures. The Federal Electric Corporation established a job cause center at Kilmer, one of 84 that have since opened. Every other week, a bus or train brings 100 youths as the center moves slowly toward its maximum payload of 2500 young men. The center has now been in operation for a year and is working to train over 1200 largely uneducated and unemployed young men into job holding tax paying citizens. The Job Corps program is unprecedented, at least as much as Project Mercury or Gemini. Like them, it has from the outset been beset by public scrutiny, internal conflicts, and pressure to produce spectacular results. Ever since Sergeant Shriver singled out Kilmer as a job core show place, it has been under fire.

A hundred page report by some of its own Rutgers consultants was sharply critical. Some newspapers have charged Kilmer with being too slow getting its full program into orbit. They find core minute Kilmer apathetic and discouraged. After a full year, the center must soon begin to show results or criticisms will mount. Both Federal Electric and the Office of Economic Opportunity recognize that the coming year may well bring a countdown, not only for Kilmer, but the Job Corps. For a new corpsman, Kilmer and the Job Corps begin here.

Many boys later describe the feeling at first glance of wanting to turn around and go back. It's not much like home. Those who have come with vague dreams of some sort of prep school campus are sometimes shocked. Conversely, for others, even Kilmer's modest exterior seems luxurious compared to the kind of neighborhood from which they have come. The last one is just before you sit down there, man. Listen, I have to carry on to welcome you back for it.

Now, each of you will come around and get a car and fill out what that is. Many of these young men have had years of experience with being questioned, written up and classified by agencies ranging from welfare to the Truent Officer. Many have come hoping that the Job Corps will be different. At the moment, they may be unsure. Critics of the center have described the atmosphere as paramilitary. The buildings are reconditioned barracks. The clothing is government surplus. There, the center hopes the resemblance ends. After filling in your life's name, your first name and your building issue, you fill in the name of your school, which is Kilmer, Job Corps Center, Edison, New Jersey. One thing is certain. For many of these youths, a form is a ticket to anonymity. A test is a certification of worthlessness.

When you have completed, if you will look up, or so I will know that you have completed, then I will give you a test booklet. These are your test booklet. You have taken the Stanford achievement test, which is a standard test designed to give the information to the teachers and the cars that they would need. You may open the booklet to the first page and you will see the direction at the top. You may read the direction silently. Then you look at the first example. The center works hard to dispel the boys ingrained feelings of despair when faced with an examination. It is not an entrance exam. The tests are truly an aid to the corpsmen and his counselors in selecting a vocational area. But to many of the new arrivals, words like test, school, teacher, even job may have mainly unhappy associations.

They must accept a new emotional vocabulary before they can begin to learn. The yellow copy, you will go to the counselor room. The green one will go to your group that are in the dorm. You will see the counselor later on Saturday and you will talk to him about your vocational. Right. You are going to the 2012 day. Russell. This is Russell. This is your first day here? Yes. Well, have you heard anything from the other fellows about how it was in the dorm? It was to Hill. We came out here and talked to him a lot about it. We said how it was. It was a great program. One of the key men in Leo Roberts' life here at Kilmer will be his counselor. He will be meeting with him regularly in the coming weeks. Most counselors have had training or experience in dealing with disadvantaged youth. Together with the group leader in his dormitory, the counselor will work with Leo in choosing his vocational area and in adjusting to his new life in the job corps.

Where he is from and why he came here are the first questions. For boys not used to giving straight answers, even this is difficult. Later, they learned to talk more freely. Well, a lot of guys came because they had no alternatives. I mean, a lot of guys that didn't go to school, they got thrown out of school. They figured this was a good opportunity to get an education, but they just messed it up again. I wanted to go to service them, but I couldn't. So, I came here just to get away from home. Well, I joined the job corps for Pacific Reason to try to improve myself in life as the way I've been told. They said all that later on since you dropped out of high school that you must prepare yourself for society. And so, I figured the best way to prepare myself while out of school was to join the job corps. To join the job corps, you've done a better trade than what I was doing with your farming, which I didn't care too much for.

I got a phone call from an employment agency, and they asked me what I used to think of going to some of the vocational school, which was free, you know, standing with them home. I said, that sounds great to have to pay for it. It's a matter of no. So, I'm pretty glad I went down the employment agency to require about it. I take a few testes and so forth. Then, within three days, we may have semi-tug round to be ready to leave to camp Kilmer. I was pretty glad because I was close to home, and that was it. Another key man is the director of the whole Kilmer Center, Paul Kettersod. He is a veteran employee of Federal Electric, a subsidiary of IT&T. He feels that his background and his companies are valuable here. Fellows that come to Kilmer are really not so different from any part of our teenage population. Of course, it is true that the bulk of the fellows have dropped out of school for one reason or another.

But, basically, as far as their personal desires, the things that they want out of life, to some extent their ambitions, they're really the same as all other fellows in this same category, or in this age group rather. The desires, the ones that desire for recognition, for having status of being somebody are all present in these fellows to much the same extent as all other fellows in the same age bracket. Well, in my particular company, we have done a substantial amount of training of employees of our own, and in some cases for employees of other companies or for members of the military service. We have trained a substantial number of people to perform for us on due line. We have performed training of other employees to work on such programs as Western Test Range.

Now, the while it is true that we are dealing with a different segment of the population here at the center, then we would be dealing with, in the case of our own employees, the basic principles of training are really the same. Regardless of what kind of a person you're training. It's the idea of the motivation of him to get him to see the need for what is being taught, and to perform the steps that are necessary to get the fundamental ideas across to him. Mr. Ketra said, describe the 11.5 million dollar Kilmer contract. Government procurement terms as a cost plus fixed fee contract. This means, of course, that we would be reimbursed for the costs which are incurred in carrying out the assignment which has been given to us. Now, this assignment is basically for us to provide at this center,

the kinds of experiences that a fellow needs in order to go out, get, and hold a job. Sergeant Shriver has praised industry's approach. We asked why. I think that there are a couple of reasons why it has been said that businesses are doing a better job of running a job core training centers than other organizations. One of these, of course, is the fact that running a center is really a tremendous management job. The controls that must be applied, the records that must be kept, the planning that must be done, all of these things we have done on numerous occasions on other jobs. The kind of work that is done here is basically within the framework of work which we have done on many occasions.

Another reason for this success could be the fact that there is a tremendous amount of personal interest in being successful. For example, my career with the company is really at stake in this program and, frankly, much of the success of the company is in this program too. If we do a good job here, this can mean additional business, furthering the careers of many employees who have been associated with this program or employees who are in other parts of the corporation. The year's experience at Kilmer has convinced him that the need for job core is real. For the fellows who come to this center, there are no realistic alternatives at the present time other than job core.

The fact that they're here is indicative of, let's say, failure on the part of the local community, the local school, whatever it might be to do the job that had to be done. And the fact that there are no alternatives other than job core is really the reason for the existence of job core. Kilmer consultant Professor Francis Priscilla questions both the program and industry's role. If we consider success to be providing youth with marketable job skills, if we consider success to be the maintenance of social control over the behavior of the youth, preventing AWOL and riots and so on, why then less another matter. But if that were the case, then I would think that other institutions in society other than private industry might be better qualified to do it. The Marine Corps, for example, might be a better instrumentality to maintain discipline than private industry and by the same token, which is the best institution to provide education and training.

Should this be private industry or should it be an educational institution? You might ask who's the best qualified to take care of the logistics, to paint the barracks, to see that there's food in the kitchen and furniture in the barracks, why this might be private industry. First of all, if you are tolerant of something, if you tolerate a thing, you do well. Few of the teachers are counselors at Kilmer have endorsed the Rutgers report. Some individual teachers seem unhappy, others enthusiastic about the program. They have been raised by federal electric officials about renewing the Rutgers contract when it expires. Of the 40-odd Rutgers consultants, only two or three have publicly backed the report. Kilmer, educational director, Henry LaParo, minimized it. The connection to the Rutgers report is basically this, that we have a subcontract with Rutgers University, and as part of that subcontract, they generate a number of reports of which the one you're referring to happens to be one.

And I have to look at all of the reports that Rutgers gave to really give a true indication of the contributions made by the University of this particular project. LaParo rejected many of the reports charges, especially those concerning discipline. In terms of discipline, I certainly wouldn't call the disciplinary action it's taken here at Kilmer Power Military, because having been in the military myself, I recognize that there's a wide divergence of opinion as to what constitutes military discipline. But I will say this, that the discipline that is taken is fair, and not only is it fair, but it's never taken without consideration of the fact that many of these boys have had a great deal of latitude of freedom. And really what we're trying to do is to point out to them that there is a better way of doing things, and the boys themselves are an integral part of the disciplinary process. As a consequence, it's very difficult for us to take a major role in opposing harsh discipline. This is not the case.

Dr. Hilsson, one of the authors of the Rutgers report, explained his doubts about the Kilmer management. And I would say that at this moment that I would find that they may do certain things in FEC well, and they may do certain things such as building new lines or early warning, or they may build electrical appliances with success. But it takes a tremendous amount of training and insight to be able to deal with youngsters already alienated, already frustrated. It takes the greatest amount of patience to deal with these kinds of kids to bring them to some level of competence and to give them what now seems to be their first and only chance. And I'm afraid that the attitudes and the attempts to deal with them as so many units on a production line, and so many items such as they would deal with products, just don't happen to work.

And I would have to do them at this moment, the program to be rather inferior as it now stands. And the specific academic changes did the report recommend. We call for a greater emphasis on the area of academics and less emphasis on the imposition of values that were not germane to this population. We call for a restructuring of the classroom organizations in an organization akin to things that I have written in the field on in non-graded education and team teaching that would have allowed for a greater adult combination and collaboration in meeting the needs of these youngsters. We had to address a few of them, but they were spelled out in rare, this precise detail, by the way. Now, naturally, some of the report is absolutely right. Some is kind of in the gray area and some I differ with. Mr. LaParo described the errors he saw in the program.

We initially started the program at Kilmer. We had to make some basic assumptions. As the type of corpsman that we be getting in terms of his academic background, the second was his readiness to learn. And the third was some assumptions relative to his reaction to Kilmer. Now, superimposed on top of this, we had certain vocational programs that we wanted to implement. During the period of the last year, we've made some astounding discoveries. I guess you say astounding in a relative sense, because many of our basic assumptions about the abilities of corpsman and their academic readiness have proved to be underestimated, and actually we find that our boys are moving through a faster pace, and also we find that they can take much more information than we had initially assumed they would. It is in the vocational training courses like this one that the Kilmer program appears at its best. The boys' motivation is that it's highest in areas like automotive repair, and the experience of federal electric corporation in this kind of training is most readily translatable.

There are 20 vocational trades being taught at Kilmer at present, from carpentry and cooking to office administration and retail sales. Most of the vocational instructors have backgrounds in industrial training rather than the school systems. Since most of their students dropped out of such systems, the center does not consider school background necessarily valuable to an instructor. Others question how much value industrial experience has in handling these young men. Climate change, you have your crane shaft gear, you have your camshaft gear, and you have other components that help make up your time and change. These two are the most important parts of your timing mechanism, because these are the two gears that you have to work with.

Now, you find that it is very important to time your vows is because you can have proper operation. Many of the corpsmen have dropped out of vocational high schools at home. What will be different at Kilmer? For one thing, the facilities. Few school systems can offer a classroom in the size of this one. Few could provide the equipment or the realistic experience. Staff members are encouraged to bring in their cars for repair work. Most of the other vehicles are government surplus. The most significant difference between job corps and the youth's previous school experience is that here he is learning each step in a trade at his own rate. There are schedules, but there are guidelines, not deadlines. This is made possible by the unusually high ratio of teachers to students. Not all vocations are as popular as promising as auto mechanics, but there is an impulse among some corpsmen to move into white collar areas, even into kinds of work that may pay less money.

The opportunities for the men in this area are in the field of office administration, logistics, that is warehousing and transportation, and the reproduction field, the printing trades, and also electronic data processing. These are fields in which there are shortages of health throughout the country, and it's in these fields that we hope to place these men. Here again, the job corps can offer such use more time to learn than any public school or company training program could possibly afford, and more individual attention. If you notice that we call this a 10-key adding machine for the simple reason that we have three rows of three, which equals nine, you're a cipher, bar, makes up to 10th key.

You'll notice on your machine, which will always be placed at a 45-degree angle. It is operated by your right hand. Your work is designated by your left hand. At all times, you will follow your work with your left hand. If you'll now place your index finger on the four, the second finger on the five, the ring finger on the six. You'll notice that these keys are concave for natural work, which your fingertips will rest within the concave. Now, at this time, I'd like for you to take your little finger and place it on the motor bar or the total bar, your thumb placed on the zero bar or the cipher bar. I have a call out numbers to you. You will write them into the machine by watching the training aid, which is on my left. Are you ready? All right. 0-5. Motor bar. 4-5. Motor bar.

Vocational areas like these have posed other problems for the Kilmer administration. It is unrealistic to train a boy in typing and to business machine operation. If he does not dress or talk or behave in a manner, which conforms to the prejudices of employers in the field. Educational director LaParo describes the center's position on this. Now, when it comes to habits and attitudes towards jobs, this is something a little more complex and this is something that he has to internalize and accept himself. And a great deal of this comes from the group interaction sessions in the evening and it can't honestly and realistically be incorporated into curriculum. His values and habits and attitudes require time to change and also it's a question of acceptance.

An ongoing attempt is made to guide the students into dress and behavior patterns, more typical of office workers. But these boys often have rebelled at past attempts to place them in moles that did not seem to fit. And there is almost an all-wellian feeling about such image shaping. The Rutgers report criticized such attempts as damaging to the youth's image of himself and his family. Other observers find the professor's fears rather academic. Since judging from the Corman's attire in class, the attempt so far have met with little success. The greatest problems, however, arise in the academic classes. Remember, yesterday we read the poem by Langston Hughes. I play it cool and dig all jive. That's the reason I stay alive. My motto as I live and learn is to be dug to dig and be dug in return. This poem tells us how to play it cool and we have another one today. I warned you yesterday we'd have one today that isn't exactly the kind of talk that Langston Hughes uses here.

This is another man telling us how to dig and be dug and return. Only he tells it in his way. We're not studying the poem as a poem exactly but as another means of communication. In other words, this guy talks to us about the same thing in a different way. Ford is a list of personality traits which actually are a summary of the things that the poet mentions in the poem which we're about to read. Plato described a good teacher as someone who can understand those not very good at explaining and can explain to those not very good at understanding. Perhaps the hardest thing to make this kind of youth understand is why he should want to learn English or speech or mathematics. These are often the very subjects that drove the boy from school. It is in precisely this academic area that critics like Professor Hilsen, charge FEC with failure to come up with curricula designed for the interests and lifestyle of disadvantaged youth.

If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two imposter just the same. What does that mean? If you meet with triumph and disaster, triumph would be what? When you were using the case of a game of checkers before, winning would be triumph and disaster would be losing. Which of these personality traits would refer to this? Sportsmanship. Fair play, right? Endurance? To stand up under something, right? Determination. Charles? Termination. Whenever you really want to get dad to do something like if you have a trade or if you're in a serve or something like that and you know you're there and you've got to make up your mind and you're just going to have to stick it out. All right, keep on pushing. In other words, you don't give up, no matter what happens. Willingness to start again, what if you're determined and you still fail? Then you have to have one more thing to hang on to, don't you? Willingness to start again, right?

The Kilmer philosophy for motivating these boys in academics is one of integrating those academics with his vocational interest. An instructor in mechanics must convince a student that he needs math to read a voltage meter. A future cook must read recipes. But can the most skillful teacher persuade him that he needs the vocabulary to master kippling? It is in this hotly debated academic program that changes are being made. Here Henry LaParro confers with a teacher and Professor Fry of Rutgers Language Institute. He's a very important one, not only getting a job but in holding a job. I guess what I have in the back of my mind here is a desire to relate speech, reading and also writing. And as Dr. Fry point out, we have to take into consideration the man's visual acuity also his ability to hear. And we're looking at a whole guest all here that we ordinarily don't consider because what we've done is we've fractionalized many segments of the curriculum and we're dwelling one at a time and he's brought all into focus here at once.

If the reading center at the university, we frequently notice that if a child needs both remedial reading, it's difficult to recover how many of the Rutgers consultants approve of the program's progress. Most, like Professor Fry, work with FEC in apparent harmony. Similarly, few teachers at Kilmer were anxious to make critical statements. Men like math instructor Alex Najee seemed out of sympathy with the whole training approach. I made up graphs on the attendance and I have shown that you cannot expect. I believe was 50, it was about the 50, about 52% of the boys in any given class would have probably been in the same and been in the class before that. So that's two problems, the attendance and the grouping. A third problem is the lack of books. From what I understand, whenever I bring this up about the boys, not having an opportunity to study after class, I am told that there's a library on the on the base.

Although there's a library on the base that library is empty, there are some books in it, but not too many. I am wondering why each have dorm, which there are 64 boys and half dorm. Each have dorm has a television set, but no access to books besides one library here at the base. I wonder how come each have dorm has a television set, but no place to study. Whenever I go into the dorm, I feel a bit depressed because of the conditions the dorms are in. Usually, most of the beds are on me, there is dirt and garbage on the floors, and I don't blame the boys for this, I just blame the whole conditions for this. In fact, I often said I respect the boys here at Kilmer who I'm working with more than many of my cohorts. It's ironic that FEC has been criticized for its permissive attitude towards housekeeping in the dormitories. This attitude is unusually progressive and a far cry from paramilitary discipline.

There are 64 corpsmen in each dorm with four group leaders. A more legitimate question is whether those numbers were determined by the corpsmen's needs or the company's cost figures. Housekeeping problems or problems like fighting or absenteeism are settled by the group meeting of the corpsmen themselves, including the culprit. Some of those will leave a job corps before graduating, join the military. Sometimes it's desperation. Others come to job corps to learn enough to qualify. Getting these boys to see that there is even a right way to leave Kilmer is the task of group leader, Laroi, Reese.

I don't know if you should do enough. Why not? Well, all right, that's a good day. He's going to do that. Why not? Because men had something to do now from Jason. Well, everybody's got to get in at some time. What time did he get permission to go? But three days in a row? Three days in a row, maybe had to go. What's more important though? What was he supposed to do? Nobody said it was wrong. But what we're talking about is the way they went about it. They had to be rules to, they had their rules to everything.

And most definitely, we have to have them here because at least 13 or 15 hundred fellows said, they have to be some established rules. When a rule is broken, then somebody has to pay. This is known, fellows know this when they come. All they learn it soon after they get here. The group leaders are probably the most valuable personal contact most of these youths will have at Kilmer. The real changes in a human personality are more likely to come out of a relationship than a lecture. Men like Reese come from such diverse roles as Peace Corpsman or parole officer. Most have had experience with this kind of youth with which many instructors lack. The boys solve most of their own problems with the group leader's guidance. But they cannot always handle an endemic job core disease home sickness. I don't like it here. The people in it are all right, but I don't like, it's too cold here. They told me they won't send me too far away from home and I'm way across the country.

This is way on the other side of the nation. I don't want to be here. It's not too bad either, but since I'm from the southwest and it's so cold over here in the east, well, I can't stand it and my course will run only for eight weeks, which I'll be leaving out of here and I have family problems. And that's what I want, since I joined Job Corps, I want to get my diploma and that's why I'm going to wait eight weeks and then go home because I'm from the southwest. It's not for me the west. There is. Here in this world of empty coffee jars, plastic pineapples and play money, the real problems begin to come into focus. As the centers administrators are so fond of saying the name of the game is jobs and the program must stand or fall on how well it is preparing young men for future employment.

A class like this one looks good on charts, but it is a little like trying to teach people to swim in an empty pool. Critics like Professor Hilsen contend that basic academic skills would be worth more to these youths in the future. Success in the mainstream or success on the job is not only going to be in terms of the ability that a youngster has in the job skill. He must have the basic elementary education and insights that are going to allow him to be able to make a shift when the particular job he's being trained for is obsolete. And I would say that many of the jobs that they're being trained for are a killer and elsewhere in the job care are obsolete. Evaluating the individual corpsman's reactions to the program's successes and failures is difficult. Absenteeism or even fighting may have many causes. Most boys gripe openly only about more fundamental things like food and girls.

The complaint about food is usually quality. With girls it's more likely to be quantity. Cormon vary in age from 16 to 22. Many have been used to rather adult social lives. The occasional dances with community groups like the YWCA are always standing on only affairs. Criticism of the Center's Inadequate Recreational Facilities have been acknowledged by FEC. Criticism of the Center's Inadequate Recreational Facilities have been acknowledged by FEC officials as one of the program's early and frustrating failures.

Chief psychologist Miles Goldberg acknowledges the past year's difficulties but rejects many criticisms in the Rutgers report. He feels that mistakes are a normal part of growth in a program which has no real precedent. Getting to know this particular population of youth and understanding them has been his job and that of the entire management. It has been difficult but he feels it has paid off. Several problems have come up as we've gone along. One, it was a question of being really unfamiliar with the boys and it's been as much a learning experience for us as it has been for the boys, perhaps even more so. Just getting to understand these boys has been at times very, very frustrating. I hear absenteeism as a problem. I don't really believe it as such.

We're dealing here with the boys who typically react to situations they don't like by withdrawing. They've dropped out of school by and large. They didn't like the school situation. Their normal reaction to any kind of frustration and intolerance for frustration is rather low. But the normal reaction of frustration is by withdrawing, by staying out. Now when you stop to look at our rates, our normal absenteeism rates, we run somewhere between seven and nine percent. This is considerably less than, for instance, the absenteeism rate in the New York public school system, which is about 11 percent. I don't see this as a major problem. Where Korman subjected to middle-class indoctrination. My feeling to the charge of imposing middle-class values is this. We are training these boys to go into a middle-class culture and to a middle-class society. Whether we like it or not, people in our society aspire to middle-class values. We're training these boys to fit in with this type of society. I don't see where it's that bad, really.

In fact, I don't think we will have accomplished anything if we train these boys to get jobs and a type of society to go back to is one in which no jobs exist. We want to train them to get into jobs and to look like middle-class citizens across this country. A dance like this is probably a pretty sedate in middle-class to many of these young men. For others, it may seem like a swinging affair. The question is whether they will accept the experiences to which they are being exposed. The same question faces the whole program. Now that the job corps has accepted them, will these use accept the job corps and what it has to offer?

Our vocation of training here is really good. In my vocation, it's really good. Because I like it and I figure that I'm getting some out of it. That's why I'm here. I have a lot of hope that God here will take change because they just don't know where to study. I mean, you can't concentrate. Sometimes a guy is back at the local foreign office where the boys sign up pain is too much for a rules and picture for them. When he comes here, he can't take what I call a shot to find that something is not expecting. Because some of the boys get a picture of a resort and that's not really a resort. It's really more or less around your own. And there's certain rules and regulations which your boys themselves make up just to put the look report so that this is funny and leave. Because they don't learn anything there. Art classes, I don't know about the rest of them. Because I've been in the other ones. But art classes, the teachers don't teach much because the guys don't go and the guys don't go because they think they don't learn much. So if they don't go, the teachers don't teach and the teachers don't teach because the guys don't go.

You know, here you can only progress just so far. And after that, you must say, go to long, you know. They can only care you say so far. But then after that, you have to go to long. That's where the parts say, coming as being a man. I learned that being here and around different boys and you learn at different ways, you learn to almost be an individual by yourself and to help yourself as you're supposed to. Not going on with the crowd all the time. Sometimes it's best to go along with the majority. Most of the time it's best to go on your own. Learn more that way. Most of the criticism of industry managed centers has been in the academic area, but there have been logistic failures ranging from lack of heat to lack of books. There also have been some serious philosophical questions in comparing the fitness between large universities and corporations to run job core centers. Lois Eigen, Associate Director of Enrolly Activities for the Corps, made some interesting points. Universities, he said, lack the resources to run such an operation.

They've had little experience training people for some professional jobs and less with this kind of youth. Industry has the manpower and resources to manage a center and plenty of experience in training and upgrading its own employees. But industry's major shortcoming, Eigenwarned, would be of tendency to extract those youths who would fit into pre-existing methods of training. The job core he cautioned would have to teach industry not to shape the man to the training, but the training to the man. Some observers at Kilmer feel the job core has failed to change just that business attitude. Success they say is being measured too much in terms of cost and efficiency, instead of in terms of the quality of the graduate as a human being. Henry Laparro feels his company's goals are sound.

The graduate of Kilmer that I'd like to see would have basically three things. He'd have sufficient vocational skills to go into entry level occupations. He'd have sufficient understanding of the world around him in terms of the family and the community so he could effectively relate to society. And the third thing is he'd have the self confidence to maximize the first two. And I think that that's very, very important because there's a lot of people with a lot of ability that don't really think they have it. And I think one of our biggest jobs here is convincing the corpsman that he has more ability than he thinks he has. Unconvinced, Professor Purcell challenges most of the basic assumptions behind the Kilmer program and the job core. Well, I have heard that in other parts of the country why some of the business concerns are experiencing more success so that I would not want to entirely discredit private industry from engaging in these kinds of training activity. And those job core centers that I have been in close contact with why I see no evidence of competence to carry out this particular difficult task.

Well, I think it's obvious to even the most casual observer that the youth being served are alienated and are filled with apathy as they once more view a program that they have most recently been expelled from or rejected from that they respond in the same way. To this program as they have to programs in the community that from which they have dropped out. Mr. Loparo attributed the Rutgers controversy to normal differences of opinion rather than basic philosophical differences. Now, basically you're going to have people at Rutgers University, you're going to have people at Kilmer who have a wide divergence of both attitudes as well as thoughts as to how this project can best be run and most effectively run. And I don't think that Rutgers or ourselves is any corner on the market of feeling that improvements can be made.

As a matter of fact, many of the improvements that they had suggested in the report, we had already incorporated an operational level and some we had previously considered and decided against. We asked Mr. Loparo to describe major changes planned for the Kilmer curriculum. Well, at the present moment of time, we're anxious to have a more direct relationship than we currently have between the academic subject matter and the vocational programs. Because in the final analysis, the name of the game as far as the job corps is concerned, is getting a corpsman out in a job and preparing him not only get the job, but to hold the job and hopefully to advance in the job. So as a consequence, we're incorporating information into the curriculum that will help him to achieve these objectives. I don't believe I can even make an assessment. I don't believe that the educational program is at all good.

As I said, I think that there are specific areas that are basically inferior. It is not an optimal learning environment in the academic area. There is a lot of equipment in the vocational area and the environment may be optimal, optimal, but I don't know whether the teaching strategies are appropriate for teaching these youngsters. But I don't see anything out there that would indicate that the learning program in the academic area or the balance between the two or the necessary elements of both that are going to make this youngster a marketable job oriented and able individual taking place. We ask what in the Rutgers report proved so explosive? Well, I think as what has happened is they've built themselves a public relations program. They've built it to such a degree that they started to believe their own press. This is a very unfortunate kind of thing. I think, first of all, it is pernicious to apply these public relations images and deal with them in such a way when you're working with the lives of young people. And the advisory report by the Rutgers people, the interim evaluatory report, which we were asked to make, a working paper that fortunately or unfortunately became public history will have to determine that, was an attempt to forget what they were doing for their outside image and move in on the gut issues of dealing with youth who are having difficulty adjusting to what was becoming a total insidious kind of institution.

And unfortunately that they kept reading the newspaper and even as we were insisting that the situation was becoming disastrous, they kept quoting what people were saying about them. I would have to say at the end of a year that the program now is more inappropriate, more inferior, more lacking in activities that are germane to this population's lifestyle and ability than it was 12 months ago. The man who carries the responsibility for the successful failure of the center is Paul Kettersen. If he seems unconcerned by the attacks on Kilmer, it may be because both the office of economic opportunity and his firm take a long range view.

The program at this center, the same as at all other centers, I believe can best be described as being fluid and will continue to be fluid for some period of time. There is much that we need to do and will do in the way of experimenting from the standpoint of determining new and different ways of doing things. For example, we are shortly going into a situation whereby the fellas will be grouped in their dormitories in accordance with their vocational training. They'll live with the fellas who are in their particular area of training, they will go to school with them, they will have their group meetings with them and so on. Now this is one of the things that we're trying which is different than we have been doing in the past and we will try several variations of this over the next six or eight months in an effort to determine which is the best approach to the problem that we have here.

Had the attacks on Kilmer shaken his confidence in the job corps? No, I believe that the job corps definitely has a future place in our nation today. It may not be in this specific form that we have it now as being sponsored by the federal government. It could well be taken over in the future by other government agencies but the kinds of things that we're doing here I think need to be done and will continue to be done in the future. What is the nature of the Kilmer controversy and who is creating it? It seems to occur on three levels. On the first it is a pure tug of war between vested interests, the big corporations and the big universities and is far from admirable. The second conflict is between the total educators and the vocational trainers. The present limits of government funds and perhaps public attitudes requires a compromise.

But in pursuing the more immediately successful vocational course, job corps management must remember the long range value of basic education to these young men and to society. The third conflict is between the humanitarian and the businessman. Here again society dictates compromise but it must not be at the expense of the youth. When federal electric announces, as it recently did, that it is cutting the planned ratio of teachers to one more economically feasible, society must wonder if this is responsible management. It is too early for a countdown at Kilmer. People are not rockets, a human personality is more complex and more valuable than the most sophisticated hardware. Is the job corps worth it then? It would cost $3,500 a year to keep a corpsman's family on welfare. It would cost $8,000 to keep a convict in prison. It costs only $4,800 to train one of these boys.

If only one in four is turned from a tax user into a taxpayer, the corps will pay for itself. The public has a right to expect that its tax monies be wisely and effectively spent. But it cannot afford to sit back and observe the trials of the job corps with a show me attitude. For the existence of the program is in response to a problem which we all have had a share in creating. It is a problem which unsolved will take a toll on the lives of many of us in the form of expanding welfare roles, rising crime rates and spreading slums. The most subtle but by far the most tragic cost of failing to rehabilitate these young people would be the tens of thousands of wasted, unproductive lives. The corporations, the universities and the press have one added responsibility to the job corps. It is to be constructive and responsible in their criticism.

Neither profit nor headlines should be purchased at the expense of these young people and their first chance for a future. For the existence of the program is in response to a problem which we all have had a share in creating. For the existence of the program is in response to a problem which we all have had a share in creating. This is NET, the National Educational Television Network.