NAEB Newsletter (Oct 1957)

in an exciting and entertaining manner. The program, which in 1953 won the Peabody Award as the best network program for children and youth, has been seen regularly on the NBC network for six consecutive years. ^ Experiments in the TV-teaching of foreign lang¬ uages to Detroit school children started last month. Detroit Superintendent of Schools Samuel Brownell, one of the nation’s leading proponents of teaching foreign languages to American school children, said the TV instruction will supplement work now being carried on in Detroit. ^ Five new series of live national TV programs will be broadcast over the nation’s educational TV net¬ work beginning Oct. 29 as a part of the joint project by the ETRC and the NBC. Inauguration of the fall programs will constitute the second part of an effort by the two organizations to connect the non-commercial ETV stations in a live network. The first part of the project was conducted earlier this year. The commercial network and the ETRC are shar¬ ing costs of approximately $700,000 to carry out both the spring and fall series. ► With 30 hours of programs each week, WCET, Cincinnati, has doubled its program schedule over last year, Uberto T. Neely, general manager of the station announced. WCET, the nation’s first licensed ETV station, is entering its fourth year of telecasting. ► An eight-program series of tape on the influence of Freud in modern America, partially financed by a $5,200 NAEB grant, will be broadcast for seven suc¬ cessive Thursday nights by the San Bernardino Val¬ ley College’s Community Education Division begin¬ ning Oct. 3. Speaking for the president of Valley College, Dr. John L. Lounsbury, and for CED Director Lawrence K. McLaughlin, Rex Gunn, public information di¬ rector of the College, expressed appreciation for “the part that the NAEB has played in Lacking the CED projects.” During the past five years, the CED projects, a permanent part of the College, has given people in the San Bernardino Valley a chance to talk back to the school’s station, KVCR. Following the broadcast of programs, several groups, numbering from 6 to 20 persons each, discuss the subjects in their homes. Questions which arise from these discussions are tele¬ phoned to the station where a panel attempts to pro¬ vide the answers at a subsequent live broadcast. On Sept. 23, KSLH, the St. Louis Board of Educa¬ tion FM radio station, returned to the air for its eighth year of broadcasting. Although planned primarily for use in kindergarten through college classes, KSLH programs are not limited to student audiences. Special late afternoon broadcasts are of interest to adults as well. This semester KSLH intends to broadcast 52 dif¬ ferent program series — 30 for elementary school, 8 for high school and 14 for college. Most of these will be produced by the station, to fit classroom needs. Also included in the series are offerings from the NAEB. ^ A Television study of the executive branch of the government to be presented over the country’s ETV stations beginning Oct. 28, was announced by Robert Sarnoff, president of NBC. He said the government study will be one of five new series of live TV pro¬ grams launched by NBC in cooperation with the ETRC at Ann Arbor, Mich. The government study will consist of behind-the- scene camera recordings of operations in federal agencies in Washington. For his part in furthering the project, Sarnoff re¬ ceived the American Legion’s Americanism Award at the Legion’s 39th Annual National Convention. AT PRESS TIME A few moments before the deadline of this News¬ letter we received notice that Commissioner Richard A. Mack of the FCC has kindly consented to speak at the NAEB Annual Banquet Thursday, Oct. 31, during the Convention in St. Louis. His address will be in addition to that of Tor Gjesdal, referred to on page two of this issue. TV LITERATURE The growing importance of educational television and the public’s increasing awareness of ETV as a pos¬ sible solution to the nation’s mounting shortage of qualified teachers is apparent from the amount of space devoted to the subject in two recent issues of Saturday Review. “The Schools of Tomorrow” by Carl Bakal (SR Aug. 24) and “Educational TV: Teacher’s Friend” by John K. Weiss (SR Sept. 14) are articles which in detail describe ETV’s present status as well as its great potential as a key intruction device. But even more eloquent than these two articles are the comments which they provoked and which Satur¬ day Review published in subsequent editions under “Letters to the Editor.” The greater number of these comments indicate clearly the rocky road which lies before ETV and the extent of the resistance which it will have to overcome before it can take its place as an established institution throughout the nation’s school systems. OCTOBER, 1957 9