Salvation by Television

Down came the blinds, darkening the classroom as 25 students raptly watched the bluish TV screen before them. The show was their French teacher, a precise little woman saying "Nous lirons la lec,on encore," and for half an hour the youngsters eagerly tried to reproduce her impeccable accent. So last week a topflight white teacher drilled Negro students in a small high school in rural South Carolina.

Moreover, white and Negro children were getting the same TV lesson all over segregated South Carolina--the state that has the most complete commitment to classroom TV in the U.S.

Launched four years ago in a converted Columbia supermarket, South Carolina's classroom TV now reaches 65 high schools (20 Negro) in 27 of the state's 46 counties. Another 65 schools (35 Negro) will join up next fall, and the goal in six years is six courses daily throughout the state's 413 high schools, plus other courses in the 1,200 grade schools.

Hollow Schools. South Carolina's TV binge is drastic--as well it might be.

Though it has proportionately more school-age children (30.8% of the population) than any other state, South Carolina is one of the slowest learners in the Union. Almost half of all eighth-graders fail to go on and finish high school, 54.4% of all registrants fail the Selective Service mental test, and no other state boasts fewer median years (8.7) of schooling completed by adults. More than 20% of South Carolinians are in fact "functional illiterates," for one out of five has less than five years of schooling.

To catch up, South Carolina is pouring money into its schools: 50% of every tax dollar now goes to education, and 80% of all pupils are in new classrooms. But the schools are "hollow," as one official puts it. Supported by the nation's third lowest per-capita income ($1,397), they can pay classroom teachers an average of only $3,760 a year, against the U.S. average of $5,527. As a result, South Carolina is critically short of able teachers.

Broad Goal. The solution is to put the state's best teachers on TV and beam their skills at every classroom. First talked up by a group of businessmen, notably Textile Manufacturer John Cauthen, closed-circuit TV can eventually cover the state at a yearly cost of only $14 per pupil. The goal is still distant, but the state legislature has yet to turn down a single new TV appropriation. Each year more coaxial cables are run from schools to microwave stations that pick up broadcasts from the South Carolina Educational Television Commission's well-appointed studios in Columbia.

At the Columbia center, a 28-man professional staff is busily taping half-hour lessons in algebra, geometry, physical science, French, and South Carolina history. The actors are fulltime teachers, who spend six to eight hours developing each lesson, often going out to classrooms to review their own performance. Besides salaries, they get fees that can boost their income to $10,000 a year.

Now South Carolina's non-TV teachers are "doing their damnedest to make sure TV doesn't replace them," says one official. "What they didn't know before TV arrived, they find out in a hurry." Most of them accept the efficacy of TV teaching. The screen rivets students, encourages them to take notes, and makes them worry if they miss a lesson.

Fringe Benefits. Moreover, teachers are used more efficiently. Columbia's A.C. Flora High School, for example, is doing away with separate plane geometry sections, now groups 230 students in one large classroom with half a dozen TV sets suspended from the ceiling. Supervised by one teacher and two assistants, the students typically watch the TV lesson for 30 minutes, then spend 15 minutes discussing it. One result: the bottom two-thirds of this year's students recently tested higher than the median of last year's separate classes. Even more impressive, the statewide median scores of TV algebra students have precisely matched the median at such top prep schools as Andover and Exeter.

TV's fringe benefits already include a show to train local school board members, a recent production of Macbeth for English literature classes, a statewide monthly brushup program for doctors, and a projected junior college TV program for evening students all over South Carolina. But the vital change is among schoolchildren, now getting a taste of expert teaching for the first time. For thousands of her classmates, one ninth-grader sunis up: "I've learned more this year than I did in the seventh and eighth grades put together.''

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