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Show Elementary Educators Challenged To Keep Pace at C S U Conference I m A need to keep abreast of our fast changing world was stressed to nearly 150 elementary educators educa-tors here Friday and Saturday at the 'Elementary Education Conference Con-ference held at the College of Southern Utah. Dr. Morris.Shirts, head of the CSV Department of education-Indicated that teachers and supervisors super-visors from a three-state area including in-cluding 10 counties of southern Utah, northern Arizona and Clark and Lincoln Counties in Nevada, were in attendance at the two-day two-day conference. Bay Mertes, director of the school and college services for United Airlines, keynoted the. conference in an address delivered deli-vered Friday evening. He advocated that our children are no longer content with "High Diddle Diddle, the Cat and the Fiddle the Cow Jumped Over the Moo." Children now-a-days, he said, would reply, "hold on, it would take a three stage rocket to even get to the moon." The concepts and implications of this age has developed new and greater challenges for our teachers in a world that is shrinking in size in this modern space age, he said. ' Mertes listed six essential "R's" I to c-uucation. In addition to reading, 'riting and 'rithmatic, he added rights, respect and respon-1 sibility. Saturday forenoon the conference confer-ence broke into small groups working on integrading the new concepts of the space age into the school curriculum. Group leaders included Eunice Naylor, director of teacher's Workshops on Aerospace Aero-space education for the Civil All Patrol and Dale Dunn, Instructor of Aero-Space education at Skyline Sky-line High School in Salt Lake City. Art Costa, regional director of the National Aeronautical Space Administration, addressed the concluding session Saturday afternoon. af-ternoon. Costa approached the subject of youth and their future In space and the challenges they present to present-day teachers. He predicted things to come as man's ability to control the cell structure of plants and animals, ani-mals, conquering cancer, harvesting har-vesting the ocean and challenged teachers to keep pace with the fast moving advances. Costa said that 80 percent of the world's scientists are presently pre-sently living and producing scientific sci-entific monograms at the rate of approximately 4000 every three days making It a seemingly unsurmountable task for people to keep informed on present day discoveries. I "Fourteen percent of the Jobs i available to the students tomorrow tomor-row are unknown today," be asserted. as-serted. , The Stone Age, he said, totaled thousands of years, tho Bronze Age approximately 1000 years, the industrial age 100 years, the atomic age is about 20 years old and the space age has celebrated its fifth annlversry. "If the present trend continues man will enter new 'ages' which may not last longer than a month or two," he predicted. |