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Show Education Faces Crisis By KATHLEEN BURKE Collegiate Press Service WILLIAMSBURG, Va. (CPS) Is there a world crisis in education, and if so what can be done about it? One hundred seventy educators from more than 50 nations met here last weekend at a conference sponsored by the U.S. government and private foundations to seek answers to those questions. There was little agreement on either question, though the report of the conference co-chairman, President James Perkins of Cornell University, Univer-sity, made substantial recommendations recommen-dations which will be presented to President Johnson later this year. Views of the crisis differed dramatically. dra-matically. Perkins saw it as the fact that "educational systems have been unable un-able to keep pace in the last decade dec-ade with their rapidly changing environments." en-vironments." Another delegate, Adam Curie of Harvard University, described it succinctly as "too many students, too few teachers, and not enough money." Others said there was no world educational crisis, just a world crisis, period. And that, they said, is a political, not educational problem. prob-lem. Still others noted a wide diversity diver-sity of problems among nations, and suggested that there was no single crisis, but rather crises, and asked that each country be permitted permit-ted to find its own solutions and that the conference not make universal uni-versal precriptions. Through working groups on topics such as management, technology, tech-nology, resources, and teacher supply, sup-ply, delegates sought to make the recommendations on a strategy and specific measures for meeting the crisis or crises by national and international action. A strong emphasis was placed on the educational problems of developing de-veloping nations and their need to tailor education more effectively to society's aims and needs. - Chairman Perkins, in his report on the conference, advocated an increase in-crease in the flow of aid from developed de-veloped to developing countries. "It is urgently important to increase in-crease the worldwide volume of such aid from its present level of one billion dollars per year to UNESCO's figure of two billion dollars," he said. He also suggested "a consortium of international and bilateral agencies agen-cies which could consolidate and coordinate the efforts of specific large countries, or the appeals of clusters of small countries." Technology as a means of relieving reliev-ing teacher shortage received a great deal of attention. Dr. Phillip H. Coombs, director of the International Institute for Educational Planning, saw teachers teach-ers themselves as the cause for slowness in accepting the new media for teaching. Coombs, whose book "The World Educational Crisis A System Analysis," formed the base of conference discussion, dis-cussion, said: "Teachers are convinced con-vinced that there's something special spe-cial about being in a classroom exposed ex-posed to a conventional approach. This is sheer nonsense." To increase the attractiveness of teaching as a profession, Perkins advocated higher pay scales. He called for "a new definition of institutions in-stitutions for teacher training." These institutions, it was generally general-ly felt, should be deeply involved in research and experimentation in the educational sphere. Students received a share of conference con-ference attention when one delegate dele-gate stated "the individual student is what we are concerned about, not the teachers. That means that education must be custom-built for him." Perkins declared, "students themselves them-selves must become a more active part of the educational process." He stressed the value of independent indepen-dent work and said that students should be "prepared to use the institution in-stitution for their own developing needs rather than becoming an inert item to be processed." In one of the highlights of the convention, President Johnson addressed ad-dressed the delegates on Sunday. He urged that the conference call on the United Nations to "set a target time for reviewing our goals and planning new progress, an international education year." |