Three Rs in the Army

Because they did not learn enough in school, 300,000 young potential recruits each year flunk the armed forces' simple aptitude tests. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara partly blames civilian teachers who not only failed to impart knowledge, but sent students into "a mental fog of boredom, confusion and noncomprehension." He thinks that the stripped-down, highly functional, systems-analyzed teaching techniques of Defense Department schools can reach these kids, and he expects to "salvage" 100,000 of them a year.

When McNamara, with typical abruptness, last month announced rather than proposed this program, congressional critics complained that the military services should not be involved in "social experimentation." Teachers were angry at McNamara's accusation of failure. Humanities scholars bridled at his application of the term salvage to people. Some Negro leaders, noting that one-third of the low aptitude trainees would be Negroes, cried that he was out "to exterminate us" by qualifying more Negroes for service in Viet Nam. Most of this criticism was far off target, but it did help raise the fundamental question of whether the Defense Department should be an engine of social progress through education.

Down-to-Earth Techniques. Obviously, civilian schools have proved a fizzle for too many youths. Just as obviously, the schools' own self-improvements, plus such antipoverty programs as the Job Corps, should be the main remedies for the failure. But as long as the military services need more manpower, it seems reasonable that they should teach such basic skills as grammar, reading and arithmetic, along with more technical skills. The relevant question is whether they are equipped to do so.

There is no doubt that military schools are highly efficient in training servicemen for specific tasks, partly because it is easier to keep a trainee interested in mastering a diesel engine than in shunning split infinitives. The services have been far ahead of public schools in the use of training films, overhead projectors, programmed instruction, individual audio aids, and closed-circuit television. Under McNamara, they have been pressured to prune all nonessential information from their training programs to increase efficiency--and the pruning works. When superfluous material was cut out of a communications repair course at Fort Knox, the rate of flunk-outs dropped from 24% to 2% .

Another effective technique in military schools is to go from the concrete to the abstract, rather than putting theory ahead of practice, as most civilian schools do. Today's radio technician, for example, learns to spot a malfunction before he learns Ohm's law. Trainees are also allowed to progress at their own pace, often working alone with programmed textbooks. Where classroom teaching is used, service schools keep the student-teacher ratio low, take full advantage of military discipline and of the sense of immediacy that training for war gives.

Small Classes. Pentagon education officers are confident that these approaches will work just as well with remedial arithmetic, reading comprehension, and the writing of plain English--the three Rs needed most by those who flunk general aptitude tests. They have already opened some such courses to help men who never completed high school and barely squeezed past the tests. At New Jersey's Fort Dix, 72 soldiers study four hours daily for six weeks under five civilian teachers, move at their own pace in classes smaller than 20 students each. At the end of the course, 85% qualify for a high school completion certificate, the others are "recycled" through weak subjects.

Pfc. Charles Shrewsbury Jr. says he dropped out of his eighth-grade class in Cocoa, Fla., because "we had like 50 kids in a class and you either got what was taught or you didn't. I didn't. And the teachers didn't seem to care." But at Fort Dix, he says, "if you don't pick up something right away, they work with you until you get it." The Fort Dix teachers are equally enthusiastic. "It's a joy--there's no end to what we are accomplishing," says Mrs. Thelma R. Bond.

McNamara also contends that many potential servicemen from "poverty backgrounds" do poorly in the aptitude tests only because the tests are "geared to the psychology of traditional, formal-classroom, teacher-paced instruction" and reflect the "verbal patterns of affluent American society. It is not because the men do not possess basic--and perhaps even brilliant--intelligence."

Bakers & Engineers. Once in the armed forces, a serviceman can broaden his education as much as he wishes. Almost one-half of all recruits wind up in technical schools, mostly in electronics and mechanical maintenance; one-third study supply and administrative jobs; 5% learn medical and dental specialties. Only 14% concentrate on firing weapons. A million servicemen are currently taking military correspondence courses, and each year nearly 100,000 get high school certificates, 3,200 qualify for B.A.s, 900 complete M.A.s.

In the schools, Negroes as well as all other servicemen are far more likely to acquire skills useful in civilian life than face "extermination." The prospect of eventually qualifying for post-service careers as anything from baker to photographer to engineer is one reason Negroes re-enlist at a rate more than twice as high as that for whites. McNamara thinks it useful to national security that men mustered out of service have "skills and aptitudes which for them and their families will reverse the downward spiral of human decay."

Training v. Education. Top civilian educators praise the armed forces' schools--with reservations. The Defense Department's 327 grade and high schools in 29 countries, educating children of servicemen, rate low. Theodore Sizer, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Education, worries that "the Army trains a lot of people, but whether it educates is another question." He believes that the pressure generated in a military organization is "great for some kids, bad for others."

William Carr, executive secretary of the National Education Association, sees "no reason to fear the military education system," and contends that civilian and military educators could benefit from each other through a "systematic exchange of information and ideas." And Cornelius Turner, who heads an American Council on Education section that determines civilian-school credit for armed forces correspondence courses, says the military does "a marvelous job" in adult education.

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