Boomers: The Cold-War Generation Grows Up by Victor D. Brooks Page B
Authors: Victor D. Brooks
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1960, there will be 10 million more students than today.â School districts were building an additional 97,000 classrooms, but even that campaign would leave 60 percent of all classes overcrowded, with 20 percent of schools unable to meet even minimal fire safety requirements.
The
Journal
pointed out that mere stabilization of class sizes at current overcrowded levels would require 425,000 new classrooms by the end of the 1950s while universityteacher training programs had produced only 46,000 new elementary teachers for the 118,000 additional positions that school districts had created. These equations meant that the best-case scenario for the immediate future was an average class size of 45 children, with even larger classes if the teacher gap continued to worsen.
The surge of new students consigned large numbers of children to a learning environment of dilapidated classrooms manned by overtaxed teachers. Yet two compensating factors emerged to make the school experience of the 1950s and 1960s much less grim than initially feared. First, a massive school construction effort, even if plagued by shortfalls, offered the opportunity for a relatively large number of Boomers to attend schools that were much more modern and cheerful than those from their parentsâ childhoods. Burgeoning suburban communities constructed gleaming, airy, attractive schools with glass walls, offering a vista of pleasant grounds. Banks of new fluorescent lights brightly illuminated classrooms on the most dismal winter days, and movable desks replaced the regimented rows bolted to the floor. New schools often featured a single-floor format where classrooms were interspersed with spacious arcades and growing numbers of special-activity rooms. School architects found themselves free to experiment with dramatic innovations that spelled the end of the last vestiges of the âlittle red schoolhouse.â
A second potential benefit of the Boomer surge was a greater receptiveness toward the use of new technology to at least partially counteract the ongoing teacher shortage. Tape recorders, portable record players, transistor radios, and enhanced filmstrips offered significant opportunities to create new learning environments. The most frequently discussednew educational technology was the emergence of television as an increasingly dominant medium. As families flocked to buy televisions that would penetrate the majority of American households by 1954, a national debate erupted over the role of the instrument in the learning process.
One national news weekly provoked substantial public response to an article titled âThe 21-inch Classroom,â which suggested that âIf it lives up to its promise, television will revolutionize teaching as nothing else since the American public school was established. Television may alleviate the critical teacher shortage, as television in both closed-circuit and over-the-air educational and commercial stations emerge. Despite the possible dangers in television, the results are so encouraging that the number of schools using it is doubling every year, and the time they allot to TV instruction is rising rapidly.â One example cited was the Hagerstown, Maryland, school district, which developed a closed-circuit system. By 1957 it was providing all children from first to twelfth grades with televised lessons from a central studio in which a teacher could reach seventeen hundred students at once.
Much of the funding for experiments in instructional television was provided by major Ford Foundation grants. Some parents believed their children were already getting too much television at home, and more than a few suspected that the new medium might someday replace conventional teachers altogether. Yet in an environment where the teacher shortage was projected to reach 500,000 by 1965, televised instruction gained increasing legitimacy.
As a growing number of educators envisioned a not too distant future when
The
Journal
pointed out that mere stabilization of class sizes at current overcrowded levels would require 425,000 new classrooms by the end of the 1950s while universityteacher training programs had produced only 46,000 new elementary teachers for the 118,000 additional positions that school districts had created. These equations meant that the best-case scenario for the immediate future was an average class size of 45 children, with even larger classes if the teacher gap continued to worsen.
The surge of new students consigned large numbers of children to a learning environment of dilapidated classrooms manned by overtaxed teachers. Yet two compensating factors emerged to make the school experience of the 1950s and 1960s much less grim than initially feared. First, a massive school construction effort, even if plagued by shortfalls, offered the opportunity for a relatively large number of Boomers to attend schools that were much more modern and cheerful than those from their parentsâ childhoods. Burgeoning suburban communities constructed gleaming, airy, attractive schools with glass walls, offering a vista of pleasant grounds. Banks of new fluorescent lights brightly illuminated classrooms on the most dismal winter days, and movable desks replaced the regimented rows bolted to the floor. New schools often featured a single-floor format where classrooms were interspersed with spacious arcades and growing numbers of special-activity rooms. School architects found themselves free to experiment with dramatic innovations that spelled the end of the last vestiges of the âlittle red schoolhouse.â
A second potential benefit of the Boomer surge was a greater receptiveness toward the use of new technology to at least partially counteract the ongoing teacher shortage. Tape recorders, portable record players, transistor radios, and enhanced filmstrips offered significant opportunities to create new learning environments. The most frequently discussednew educational technology was the emergence of television as an increasingly dominant medium. As families flocked to buy televisions that would penetrate the majority of American households by 1954, a national debate erupted over the role of the instrument in the learning process.
One national news weekly provoked substantial public response to an article titled âThe 21-inch Classroom,â which suggested that âIf it lives up to its promise, television will revolutionize teaching as nothing else since the American public school was established. Television may alleviate the critical teacher shortage, as television in both closed-circuit and over-the-air educational and commercial stations emerge. Despite the possible dangers in television, the results are so encouraging that the number of schools using it is doubling every year, and the time they allot to TV instruction is rising rapidly.â One example cited was the Hagerstown, Maryland, school district, which developed a closed-circuit system. By 1957 it was providing all children from first to twelfth grades with televised lessons from a central studio in which a teacher could reach seventeen hundred students at once.
Much of the funding for experiments in instructional television was provided by major Ford Foundation grants. Some parents believed their children were already getting too much television at home, and more than a few suspected that the new medium might someday replace conventional teachers altogether. Yet in an environment where the teacher shortage was projected to reach 500,000 by 1965, televised instruction gained increasing legitimacy.
As a growing number of educators envisioned a not too distant future when
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