Educational Froth

Once, when young and idealistic, I studied educational theory. It is indeed rich, with even normally unexpected personalities getting involved. Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the US Navy’s father of nuclear power, wrote several books on it, for example. But, well he might.

In creating the Navy’s nuclear power program, he created schools to train engineers, officer and enlisted, who would be operating those nuclear power plants. For enlisted men, the program was one-year long, six months of classroom, six months of actually operating shore-based nuclear plants duplicating those at sea. “Intense” would be the descriptive word. Each week was a different topic and that one topic was all that was taught that week. At the end of the week, a pass-fail exam was given, and should one fail, a review was given to determine if the person repeated the week or was dropped from the school and nuclear program, reputedly for transfer to the least desirable duty the Navy could imagine for one’s specialty. If one made a “C,” one attended mandatory study hall until one’s grade average rose to “B” or one finished school. Study hall ran from 8 p.m. to 1 a.m., and was manned by qualified instructors who did help the student.

Performance of school graduates was so high that the Atomic Energy Commission, the outfit that ran the US civilian nuclear power program, and was run by Rickover, passed a rule that civilian companies could not hire Navy nuclear personnel for at least six months after they were discharged from the Navy. Navy nukes, as they were called, were preferred over even Masters graduates from civilian colleges, and the civilian companies offered sometimes twice per week the amount the Navy paid per month. This of course does not consider that civilian-power-plant duty did not require being at sea for months at a time.

Rickover certainly had credentials for writing about education, and felt impelled to do so because of the low educational quality of high school and college graduates he had to deal with when inducting people into his program. He favored the British system of the 11-year exam that determined which schools one could attend next. Lower scores received training toward making a living, graduating students for work earlier than American high schools. Higher scores were able to attend liberal arts or technical schools, graduating at 19 with the equivalent of two-to-four years of an American college. I worked with one graduate of a British technical school, and his knowledge seemed far superior to American electrical engineers with a BS. I was very impressed.

This is but one example of educational methods, theory, etc., easily available and widely published, but seldom practiced in the imperative immediacy of "teaching to the test," and other such well-intentioned requirements to offset low budgets, low salaries, low priorities and other impedimentary ills of the educational system. Short sighted, they are, since the one law most profitable for America was the World War II GI Bill, which paid the educational expenses of millions of former servicemen, providing government many extra billions in tax revenues from the increased income those servicemen earned over their lifetimes.

Too bad the country doesn’t see education as a stimulus.