You're in the Classroom Now

At least in theory, it is now possible for a semi-illiterate to enter the U.S. Army and come out a college graduate, with the Pentagon paying 75% of the tab. To apply its fabulous technology, the U.S. military has become an extraordinary teacher of everything from astronautics to electronics to nucleonics to teaching itself. Now the Defense Department even has a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education. He is Edward L. Katzenbach Jr., a driving man of 44 who runs a $350 million-a-year empire that spurs learning throughout the armed forces, although it does not control such elite professional schools as West Point and the Naval War College.

The U.S. serviceman now spends 50% to 80% of his time in schools, says a report issued last week by Columbia University's Teachers College. The military has 300,000 students in schools all over the world, from Arctic huts to the National War College. In the U.S. alone are 300 military schools teaching 4,000 courses, from the three-R level to the Ph.D. Even the raw recruit now spends a third of his time in a classroom; the general gets the equivalent of two or three years of graduate study. To keep everyone learning off-duty as well, 33 correspondence schools provide 2,500 mail-order courses to 1,000,000 servicemen and servicewomen around the globe.

Welter of Waste. Military learning is also balm for the unemployment problem: at least 60% of what the services teach is directly applicable to civilian jobs. Hundreds of thousands of servicemen go back to become everything from auto mechanic to bacteriologist to weatherman. Almost 100,000 men now in the services have been raised to the equivalent of a high school education since they entered--a figure equal to about a tenth of the nation's annual school dropout rate.

Until recently, military education was a welter of waste, duplication and congressional bewilderment. In 1961, Katzenbach was brought in to organize military learning, coordinate it with civilian education. Katzenbach, whose younger brother Nicholas is U.S. Deputy Attorney General, had the right pedigree for both sides. He earned his Legion of Merit as a Marine officer at Eniwetok, his Ph.D. at Princeton. He taught history at Columbia, directed defense studies at Harvard and academic development at Brandeis.

Katzenbach's toughest problem is the U.S.'s ninth biggest school system--the 284 overseas schools serving 161,040 children of military men abroad. He hears bitter complaints from the schools' 7,000 civilian teachers, whose pay has risen only $100 a year since 1960. But he has three applicants for every vacancy, and is striving hard to standardize everything from grading to accounting.

Katzenbach's happiest operation is the 22-year-old U.S. Armed Forces Institute, a mail-order education factory in Madison, Wis. Proud product of World War II, it has now enrolled more than 5,000,000 students, distributed more than 44 million textbooks. For $5, the shopper can pick any of 6,400 courses, from elementary through college level; if he completes the first course, the rest are free. College-level courses (now the majority) are provided directly from cooperating colleges, but the colleges are still sticky about credits for nonresidents. One captain has taken enough courses to get a Ph.D., but has not stayed put long enough to get a B.A. "This is a mobile group and the universities have not caught up," Katzenbach complains.

As a partial solution, the services now send officers who are within a semester of a degree to civilian campuses to live at full pay while pursuing fields from physics to philosophy. The Air Academy sends new graduates on to M.I.T. or Caltech for master's degrees; the Army picks 200 enlisted men a year to attend civilian colleges, pays about three-fourths of the cost. The Navy sends even WAVES off to earn science and engineering degrees, pays four-year costs at 19 colleges and universities.

The drive is on to make every officer a college graduate (about 65% are) and every noncom a high school graduate (about 73% of all enlisted men are). While they sit 80 ft. underground, in ICBM launching capsules, Air Force officers now spend most of their time studying for master's degrees. Katzenbach has stirred the Joint Chiefs of Staff to such interest that now "a big, fat committee" is hard at work relating education to overall strategy.

To help streamline the military, Katzenbach has worked up a new systems management school, helped the Navy start a computer institute to teach the art to all ranks. To educate the military about its impact on society, he has designed new U.S.A.F.I. courses that relate military and civilian technology back to 1750. To teach soldiers "what society thinks of them," he set up another course on 19 war novels, from Stendhal's The Red and the Black to Jules Remains' Verdun. "You sure are educating us," says one of his majors, who has read six of the novels so far.

Results Count. The military has an equal chance to educate civilian education itself. Service schools have pioneered in everything from training films to programmed instruction. At Long Island's Naval Training Device Center, 600 experts spend $60 million a year to produce a fantastic array of teaching aids, from mock submarines to simulated human flesh that bleeds on order.

The Pentagon is now teaching foreign languages to more than 200,000 students, biggest such Babel in the U.S. In Washington, D.C., and Monterey, Calif., it runs two of the world's most effective language schools--founts of the speak-first, grammar-later method.

Every service now has exemplary teacher-training programs with no nonsense over "philosophy of education" courses. Civilian schools could well emulate the clear, logical, incisive teaching that results. In military teaching, results count, and the motto is unforgiving: "If the student has failed to learn, you have failed to teach."

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