Educational screen & audio-visual guide (c1956-1971])

Tooling Up For Take-Off editorial X HESE will be controversial words. They propose a revolutionary solution to a problem facing all concerned with the use of newer means for communication. How can teachers get the tools they need for teaching? These thoughts for solving this problem are carefully, considered, — but nevertheless, controversial. Read them carefully, and react. A teacher's primary task is communication. He knows both subject and learner. He is a guide and leader. He works with groups of learners; and to teach them, his task is to communicate ideas, inspiration, motivation, the desire to want to know, and knowledge itself. Technology has potentially provided teachers with electronic and audiovisual tools that could revolutionize their teaching by making communication efficient and sure. Those who control the costs of education and who should provide essential tools for teaching have so far failed to provide teachers with the tools they need. The immense dimensions of their failure are graphically and irrefutably spelled out in Occasional Paper No. 6 just released by Dr. James Finn's Technological Development Project. The full title of this extremely valuable document is "Studies in the Growth of Instructional Technology, I: AudioVisual Instrumentation for Instruction in the Public Schools, 1930-1960 A Basis for Take-Off." (And only the Project's Principal Investigator could have dreamed up a title like that!) The cost for achieving essential goals of one overhead projector, one record player, one filmstrip projector, one tape projector, and one of other kinds of equipment for every five teachers in American schools is staggeringly great. Yet the Project concludes these are goals that must be achieved. Now then, our solution : If those who are charged with the responsibility cannot or will not provide and pay for the essential tools of communication, then teachers themselves may have to buy their own communications tools. And why not? Doctors buy their own tools. So do dentists, and surveyors, and draftsmen. And so do automobile mechanics, carpenters, and plumbers. A teacher's primary task and skill and function is to communicate and it must be his business and concern, too, to make sure he has the best and most efficient tools for his task. If Boards of Education and Boards of Trustees will not supply tools for teachers, then teachers may have to do it themselves. Teachers could not be expected to buy a full complement of communications tools. But they might be ready and more than willing to buy one or more of the lower cost units if they were encouraged and helped. Many teachers already own and use their own tape recorders and record players. Filmstrip and overhead projectors should also be considered. Teacher associations and unions, and teacher credit organizations JP^ul C Reed could aid in this tooling up process. They could accumulate orders, get minimum prices for quantity purchases, arrange for lowest interest charges, and even make it possible for teachers to pay through payroll deductions. Ten dollars a month for fourteen months would be no burden at all for a teacher who knows the value of an overhead projector, and who also knows he'd have to wait years for the administration to get one for him. Are teachers ready and willing to spend their money to aid in this gigantic tooling up process? Should they? Would you help and encourage them to do this? What do you believe? How far would you compromise your principles? Do you have printable thoughts? p.s. Even though these words were written within an hour or so after Schirra completed his six orbits, the "take-off" of the title is not a take-off into outer space. We mean the kind of "takeoff" that Dr. Finn refers to in his Occasional Paper No. 6. You should read this, too. You can get a copy for $2.50 from the Project at 1201 Sixteenth Street, N. W. Washington 6, D. C. Educational Screen and Audiovisual Guide — ^November, 1962 645