Education by Radio (1932)

in a thousand whose skill and insight are a priceless asset? Com¬ mercial broadcasters today are paying tens of thousands of dollars for talent that exists unused in the schools of this coun¬ try. By means of radio it is possible for New Hampshire at a relatively small cost to place at the disposal of every teacher in either country or city a corps of master teachers. The task be¬ comes the simple one of finding out who, in all the fine elemen¬ tary schools, high schools, and colleges of New Hampshire, has the best contribution to make in a particular field. In New Hampshire — There are in New Hampshire some 465,000 people. There are approximately 72,000 pupils giving their full time to the work of the schools. These 72,000 pupils will be distributed thruout the various grades. For example, if Miss A is assigned to teach third-grade arithmetic over the radio she will have a class of about 7000 pupils. Perhaps 40 percent of the class period can be devoted to radio teaching, leaving the other 60 percent for the regular classroom work, thus freeing the classroom teacher to give larger service to the individual pupils. Likewise there may be a class of over 5000 in the health lessons for the seventh grade, a class of over 4000 in the history lessons for the eighth grade, a class of several thousand studying American literature. Within a few years each college and university, each city school, each county school system, each public library, each community organization would be making a rich and vital con¬ tribution to the cultural advance of the state. The improvement of the people would deliberately and inspiringly come to be the major enterprise of the school. The success of radio would be measured not by a sales-talk yardstick but by the growth in culture among the people. Adult education — There is another phase of education by radio which is probably even more important than its use in the school classrooms. That field is adult education. There are millions of adults in the United States today who are as help¬ less as children amid the confused conditions which surround them. They need instruction to guide them in the management of their personal affairs, to help them understand the conditions of today’s life, to enable them to adapt themselves to new con¬ ditions, and to play their part in the civic and cultural life of our time. There are millions of grownups who now have con¬ siderable leisure thru unemployment or the shortened working day, so that they have time for study and the improvement of their minds. The task of giving educational service to this vast adult population is immediate and pressing. Radio in the hands of the college and university authorities of a state like New Hampshire could easily develop a program of adult education that would reach into every home of the state, that would bring into that home the best cultural heritage of the state, that would help the home to create a wholesome atmosphere for the rearing of children, that would acquaint the people with the economic resources, problems, and possi¬ bilities of the state. While many thousand grownups are already enroled in adult schools of various types, indicating that the idea of lifelong education has already gained recruits, sufficient social responsi¬ bility in connection with this movement has not yet been de¬ veloped. Inevitably society will come to support a program of education extending thruout life. Radio will take its place in this program along with the textbook, the laboratory, and the newspaper. It is thru the education in our schools, thru the education of adults, and thru the general community influences such as radio ( that we build and maintain our civilization. It is natural that we should think of civilization in terms of its machinery and its scaffolding. They are merely an incidental phase of it. When a great catastrophe wipes out a city by fire or storm or earth¬ quake, we are astounded at the speed with which the material structure can be replaced. Debasing culture — It is not so easy to replace the real foundations of civilization. Fundamental ideals and habits of character are not made over in a moment or in a year or even in a generation. Just now there is much discussion of our system of money and in some quarters there is fear that the coinage will be depreciated and debased. There is another coinage far more precious, far more essential to human happiness and stability than the pieces of metal or the sheets of paper which we use in our daily financial transactions. This more fundamental coin¬ age consists of the ideas, ideals, purposes, motives, manners, and morals which make up the culture of the people. To debase this culture is a much more farreaching and serious matter than to debase the financial coinage of a nation. We would strike down a man who would go into one of our art galleries and deface a beautiful painting, but the daily degradation of that more universal and precious heritage, the mother tongue, and of our manners and morals is going on over the radio on a colossal scale. This debasing of our cultural coin¬ age may easily destroy all that homes, schools, and churches | combined can build up, and the Smart Alec will possess and destroy civilization itself. Comparative costs — New Hampshire is a small state as our American states go, but it is abundantly able to support its own program of education by radio. The cost of using radio for education is insignificant as compared with the cost of text¬ books and other forms of equipment. An ideal radio equipment for the schools of a state would include a loudspeaker in every classroom of the state. It would include some kind of micro¬ phone pickup in every school in the state, including the high schools, the colleges, the teachers colleges, the state department of education. It would include broadcasting facilities which would reach every home and every classroom in the state so that there would be the possibility of picking up a program or a unit of instruction at any point and of distributing it to classes at any other point. To develop this close linking of the school system of the state so as to mobilize its entire educational re¬ sources would be relatively inexpensive. The cost of building and operating a firstclass radio broadcasting station is no greater than the cost of building and operating a single school plant of average size. A few schools, a few states are already at work. Experiments will grow into established practise ; the benefits of the new pro¬ cedure will spread until within 10 or 20 years the radio broad¬ casting system under the direct operation of the state will be the major educational enterprise in the state. Life will take on a new significance. People’s minds will be less occupied with the petty and the trivial; there will be more devotion to the fine, the important, the beautiful, the useful, the substantial. [ 102 1