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Show ! Schools Should Profit From Own Advances By Paul Lerevor Beaver County Superintendent of Schools Growing problems of the schools, arising from the explosion ex-plosion both of population and knowledge in recent years, can be solved if the schools will make use in their own operations opera-tions of some of the new technologies tech-nologies and procedures which are themselves a product of which are being neglected, Mr. Bish suggests, referring particularly partic-ularly to the cultures of the emerging nations which are becoming be-coming important in world affairs. af-fairs. Compounding the growth of population is the increasing mobility of the population, he notes. He quotes Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, as likening the situation to a giant egg beater, centered at about St. Louis, which is sending streams of people, mostly the disadvantaged from the South, into the urban centers of the North in ever-increasing numbers. num-bers. The teacher must iearn to cope with these new situations mid "keep the store" while going go-ing back to school herself at summer sessions and during afternoon and evening hours so that she may stay abreast of developments in the subjects sub-jects she teaches. "This," Bish says, "is not easy to do." Charles E. Bish, director of the Project for the Acedemically Talented. Schools have now become a big business, Bish points out, adding that he sometimes wonders won-ders if they are tied too closely to a "pen and pencil age." "Are we paying the teachers larger salaries each year to do things like making out the register?" reg-ister?" he asked. "This is absurd. ab-surd. The good systems, some of them, are gonig to the use of punch cards and magnetic tape for data processing, just as the banks do. "We must find ways to relieve re-lieve teachers of the burdens of clerical work and other non-teaching non-teaching duties. There are two ways of doing this. One is by employing more teacher aides this is not done on anything like the scale that is needed. High school graduates could go into any high school I have ever seen and perform a tremendous tre-mendous number of tasks which now take up the time of teachers." teach-ers." The time that teachers now spend in non-teaching chores, Bish suggests, might well be devoted to planning and in-service training so that they can keep up with the expansion of knowledge. In addition to employment of teacher aids, Bish holds, much time could be saved by the use in school management of the new procedures and technologies tech-nologies commonly employed in industry. Equipment is available for handling scheduling schedul-ing of classes, keeping records of credits earned by teachers thru summer study, payroll preparation and maintenance of supply records, all of which now require a great deal of the time of the professional staff. Television and teaching machines will never take the place of the teacher in the classroom, Bish says, but they too have a contribution to make in the more efficient use of school resources. School enrollments have expanded ex-panded greatly, both because there are now many more people peo-ple and because people are staying in school longer than' ever before. At the same time there has been a vast increase in the amount of knowledge, particularly in the physical sciences, so that the body of knowledge is far more than any one person can teach or learn. In the social sciences there are great areas of study |