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A YEAR
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Chief, Visual Education Service,
U. S. Office of Education,
Washington, D. C.
WHERE are we? Where have we been? Where arc we going? These are the questions I fate in attempting an audiovisual review of 1958 and preview of 1959. They are not easy questions to answer and I am tempted to paraphrase the title of a recent best-seller*: Where are we? HERE. Where have we been? THERE. Where are we going? SOMEWHERE.
Statistically, the three questions simply cannot be answered. We have no national quantitative data collected at regular time intervals over past years which would provide an index of changes and a base for forecasts. We know the number of dairy cows on U. S. farms everv year for the past 25 years (20.510,000 in 1958) but do not know the number of 16mm film projectors in use in schools and colleges for any year. We measure the change in consimier prices every month but we have no index measuring the status and growth in audiovisual education. This state of ignorance disturbs me greatly, as I indicated in a paper delivered to the Research Committee of DA VI at its convention last spring. Perhaps a remedy can be evoked from the National Defense Education Act of 1958. More of this idea later.
Maybe it is best that statistical answers cannot be made to the three questions I have posed. Valuable as numerical data are, they frequently do tend to constrict imagination and thinking. At any rate, practically, I must rely on observations and insights— and perhaps even astrologic hunches.
1958 has been an extraordinary year for audiovisual education— a year of challenge, of cooperative effort, of genuine accomplishinent. The educational values of audiovisual materials are now recognized both explicitly and implicitly in Public Law 85-864 of the United States of America, more popularly known as the National Defense Education Act of 1958, now inevitably abbreviated to "864" or "NDE.\."
There is no need here to recite the audiovisual provisions in this Act. They are nimierous, ranging from grants to states for the purchase of audiovisual materials and equipment to the training of teachers in the use of W instructional materials to research and experimentation in the potentialities of new educational media. Paul Reed has ably called them
•Smith, Robert I'aiil, Where Did You Go? OCT. ]yiint Did You Do? NOTHING.
610
EdScreen & AV Guide
December, 1958