Rockefeller
Panel V

# I
## Introduction

A Note on the Scope and Special Concerns of This Report

The task of Subpanel V is an extraordinarily basic one. Its
assignment requires nothing less than an examination into the
question of the total employment of human beings in America in the
second half of the Twentieth Century in such a manner as best to
insure their individual happiness and personal fulfillment on
the one hand, and on the other to best meet the complex needs of
an exceedingly vigorous, dynamically expanding technological
society. Such an inquiry, of course, is of staggering magnitude,
and the most that the Subpanel can do in acute recognition of its
lack of omniscience is to try to indicate the proportions of the
picture, to point to some of the features of the landscape that
seem to us of greatest moment, and to suggest areas in which
solutions are particularly urgent. In our selective treatment of
our assignment we also avowedly reflect the fact that the back-
grounds, experience, and predilections of our members lead us to
give primary attention to the following three areas:

1. A theme running through all our discussions has been America's growing need for talent and high competence. The quality of American life and the enhancement of this quality depends upon the quality of our leaders, our thinkers, and our innovators.

We feel that this need is at present so acute as even to
pose a threat of becoming a limiting factor in the growth of
American society. We feel that, by the very nature of our society,
its demand for talent will continue to expand almost exponentially
as the century rolls on.

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We must look first, then, at ways to insure an adequate supply of leaders, thinkers, and creators, and in doing so we are seeking the principal levers to lift the level of total performance, total opportunity, and total welfare of our people. The identification, encouragement, education, and utilization of high talent at all levels is of first priority in any program to better the utilization of human resources.

In thus stressing the importance of high talent, we do not minimize the importance of high performance at all levels of talent. It is not enough for the exceptional to act exceptionally. Throughout the entire spectrum of abilities the goal should be to achieve the opportunity and incentive for the fullest possible exercise of each ability. While we hold that Americans have too great a fear of an elite (democracy more than other kinds of society requires talent and leadership), we nevertheless feel strongly that the U. S. must seek in every way to foster what John Hersey has called the "triumph of unremarkable men." But having said this we say again that the U. S. must give more attention, more priority, more recognition to that high level talent which has the capacity to lead, to innovate, and to imagine and thus to advance our society. We must marshal public opinion to de-emphasize the hot-rodders among our youth and to encourage the hot minds.

As we have shared in the discussions of other panels, we have repeatedly had pressed upon us this need for educated talent to meet the nation's requirements and to carry out the programs advocated by these panels. To cite a single example, it has been reiterated that one of the most acute and dangerous shortages in the U. S. today is men and women properly oriented and educated for foreign service in many professions and fields. We need more

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such skilled manpower to work for our government and corporations
abroad. We need a pool of such skilled manpower to work in back-
ward areas to help them in their struggle to raise their standard
of living.

2. Given our preoccupation with the need for high talent and for values and incentives, it was foreordained that the importance of education should be central in all our discussions. In fact, we have given it our major attention, thus reflecting our deep conviction that an improved educational system is essential if we are to better realize our full human resources potential. As a consequence, our report might better be termed a discussion of education and the development of manpower.

3. Next, we early concluded that in discussing the utilization of human resources it is not enough to look at quantitative facts. We must also look at attitudes, values, and motivation. We must recognize that values and motivations change--indeed, we see many changes in post-war America--and that some kinds of values are better than others, some kinds of motivation are more useful to society and more satisfying to the individual than others. We see cause, for example, to be apprehensive over the current willingness to substitute security for adventure and in the lack of challenge in many occupations. Is it not possible that business careers today are undervalued by gifted and sensitive young people because business is considered by them to be wholly materialistic or acquisitive?

As we have discussed values and motivation, we have recognized
the growing importance of personality and emotional factors and
our great lack of manpower with the insight and training to under-
stand these factors and to use this understanding.

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As we have explored the realm of values, it has seemed clear that our form of society, both in ideal and in reality, must be deeply concerned with the cultivation of human excellence for its own sake as well as with the growth of our economy, with human values and spiritual goals as well as material gain, and that as a consequence the approach to the better utilization of human resources cannot be merely that of the efficiency expert or the balance sheet.

We feel, moreover, that it is essential to the individual health and happiness of the American people that existing talent be enabled to express itself in socially useful and personally satisfying ways to the greatest possible extent. This is not a new condition on the American scene. It has been true in some measure from the very beginning. But the growth of our population and, still more, the enormously expanded volume and complexity of the demands of our society in recent years make this, we feel, one of the major national challenges to America in the second half of the century.

The goals and motivation to leadership which will influence the coming generations of talented persons have seemed of increasing importance to us as we have explored our assignment,

In thus emphasizing qualitative factors, we do not ignore the inexorable influence of *quantitative* change, the importance of demographic factors. In the next twenty years our population will probably increase by some 55 million, or by nearly a third. Much of this increase will congregate in urban areas, thus continuing the trend from the farm to the city. From this growth and shift of population are arising an array of social problems which increasingly tax our ingenuity and wisdom.

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(Note: Some additional material might be added here
from Kirk's paper on population.)

As we have pondered these three selected aspects of our
topic, we have agreed that other factors cannot be neglected. We
have considered the conservation of existing manpower, the ef-
fective use of the gifted after retirement, the growing importance
and changing impact of womenpower. We have considered the
question of locating the potentially talented "misfits" in our
society and making it possible for them to transfer their oc-
cupations into areas where they will be more happy and effective.
We have considered the question of minorities, with all the
resources which they bear, and how to ensure that the en-
vironment for their development shall be as good as that of
majority groups. We have been concerned with the emotional
climate in which our people must live in the second half of the
century, and the role of psychology and psychiatry in under-
standing it and coping with it. We have been concerned with the
physical environment in which our society will have to work in
the second half of this century, and the great problem of slums
and substandard living conditions and the wastefulness they
bring, in human and in social terms. We have noticed the problems
that increasing spans of leisure time may pose for the indi-
vidual unless he is well prepared to make good use of it.

These considerations appear diverse. But we would emphasize
once again that in fact they are closely focused about this mat-
ter which we feel one of the most important that America must
consider in the coming years--the optimum use of the gifted, in
whatever areas their gifts may lie, whatever may be the quality
of their gifts, wherever they may be, and whatever they may do.

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And central to this problem, itself so central, are the questions
of education in America in the second half of the century to
achieve this end. This is the deepest center and focus of our
interest.

Two other introductory observations must be made.

1. It is a striking fact that we in the U. S. have become concerned with the better use of our human resources largely since the beginning of World War II. Before then there was little study of the problem, and a subpanel such as this one would not likely have been a part of some pre-war Rockefeller Brothers Special Studies Project. One of our suggested courses of action is the encouragement of a more systematic study of our human resources under the sponsorship of universities, foundations, and government. We need more knowledge and understanding of the multiple factors affecting the development of human resources and more recognition of the changing needs of our society for various orders of talent and skill. Our studies should include consideration of the competing needs and claims of various sectors of society and provide perspective on long-run as well as immediate manpower problems. Only in this way can we dampen the violent oscillations in our estimates and response the kind of miscalculation we have witnessed in recent years in our underestimate of scientific manpower needs. This lack of planning we have had in the past needs to be ameliorated by more accurate knowledge and foresight. We need to minimize what Ralph McGill has called the "rhythm between panic and apathy." We need above all to recognize that we can no longer be thoughtfully prodigal in our use of human resources.

2. In its discussions the Subpanel has had the benefit of

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numerous consultants and guests who have contributed importantly to our thinking. We have also had many differing points of view expressed in our meetings, and we are impressed by the importance, given the great issues with which we deal, to recognize the value of emphasizing these differences.

With these introductory notes on the predilections and limitations and special concerns of this report, let us turn next to an examination of the great changes which have occurred in our society and which are profoundly important in any consideration of human resources.

## II

### The Big Change

Unless we ponder it specifically, it is hard to remember the enormity of the change that has come over our society since the time of the American revolution or even since that classic visit of H. G. Wells to our shores at the beginning of the twentieth century that is enshrined in his *Future in America*--the "Big Change" so effectively set out by Frederick Lewis Allen. Yet no cohesive society is ever entirely discontinuous in its evolution. We may have gone through a profound revolution in the last two centuries, both socially and politically. But, despite what we may be entitled to call our radicalism in this context, we have probably experienced fewer basic discontinuities of development during those two centuries than almost any other great nation, and few can vie with us in the extent to which their initial attitudes and conceptions have remained, albeit variously shaped and altered, as the fundamental doctrine of a people.

So it is not surprising that two precious roots of our society which were dominant at the inception of the nation continue

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to underlie the American ethos in the twentieth century, though
the context in which they operate today is radically different.
The first is the tradition of the precious nature of the indi-
vidual, in whose service the body politic exists, the

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individual who shall have equal opportunity according to his ability, and
whose worth and social status shall be decided by the quality of his achieve-
ment under these conditions -- achievement made on his own terms, without
interference, but also without quarter from his peers. Such a tradition,
transplanted to the American wilderness, could only lead -- as it did -- to
the patterns of individual competition, of standards of generalized practical
competence, of rugged independence, which we cherish so deeply today.

To this root was joined another, brought likewise from the Old World
and equally well adapted to the American scene. It was the tradition of
pragmatic competence, of practical ability, of mechanical ingenuity in a
relatively primitive sense, of the gift for borrowing and adapting gains, alike
material and political, from other cultures and shaping them to the needs of
the new society. Joined to a culture which was already highly advanced at
the time of its transplantation, these were surely two of the most important
elements in conditioning the national attitudes which we have inherited.

The two roots conjoined in an extraordinarily powerful way. The history
of cultures is replete with evidence that practical technology flourishes when
individual dignity is high, when labor is free and scarce and expensive, and
that, on the contrary, in societies that are highly stratified, that depend upon
a mass of slave or otherwise socially depressed labor, the evolution of
technology lags. The reasons, of course, lie deep both in the spirits of free
men and in sheer economics.

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It is not surprising, therefore, that in an America dedicated above all to individual dignity, individual independence, and the inevitably resulting ideal of individual competition, and considerably natively gifted in pragmatic technology to boot, the early development of crafts and of industry should have proceeded as explosively as it did. It is not surprising, too, that the early ideal should have been one of practicality rather than of theory, or that, once a generally high standard of achievement was attained, we should have turned to Europe for our greatest innovators, and have been able to provide them an optimum environment at home, both for the development of their gifts and the utilizing of them. For the establishment of a generally high level of standard and achievement in a nation itself makes it possible that all but the very greatest of achievements can be accomplished by a numerous cadre of high talent. Only the most difficult of intellectual innovations must then await the towering genius. That process, spurred by two World Wars, undoubtedly shortened by many years the maturing of our national climate to the point where, as now, towering genius as well as high talent may be native among us.

The society that thus set the milieu so effectively for explosive technological advance not only brought it about, but in turn was profoundly affected by it. The history of this effect was the history of the industrial revolution in America. There is much in its early phases to suggest that its first consequence was to further confirm and enhance the individualism already so characteristic by enlarging its opportunities and its scope. The second phase,

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the sort of industrial development typified in the earlier mills and the earlier mining industry, for example, very probably arrested the trend to individualism. The advent of bulk industries served by massive but comparatively crude machinery created a demand for labor of relatively low intellectual training or specific attainment, and the swelling of the immigrant wave of the relatively underprivileged from Europe which coincided with the demand met and reinforced it. America surely passed through a period in which the greatest industrial investments were thought of in terms of machines rather than humans -- a period which in many ways saw a considerable reversal of the earlier adaptive demand for high individual competitive attainment. It may well be that those years saw the furthest departure from the effective finding and use of latent talent that Americans will ever witness.

We tend at times to project this era in our thinking into the present and the future, into the periods of giant corporate industry and highly intricate, largely self-sufficient machinery. Many of the worries connected with the catchword "automation" stem from this source. Others are more direct and simple, stemming only from the concern that in an industrial world served by largely automatic machinery, the problem of labor, in the older sense, will be greatly complicated.

We believe that the problem of labor *will* be complicated in the future, but in a different way. There is much reason to think that the very complexity of modern industry is serving, and may serve much more in the future, as a force once again increasing the demand for high competitive talent. For

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modern industrial processes may require fewer people to serve them per individual plant. But these people must be of high quality and high training. The investment in them by industry has once again come to dwarf the investment in plant - a factor itself making for a high pressure, by the user, on talent selection and training. Furthermore, the evidence is most suggestive concerning "automation" that, while it may reduce the number of individuals required in a given plant, the efficiencies so achieved and the new areas that can be explored themselves give rise to enough new kinds of industries to more than fill the labor gap. This has been the history of many industrial innovations in the immediate past which, at the time that they occurred, were viewed with the greatest apprehension. It seems most likely that this will be the history of the future, to a greatly increased degree. Thus the industrial system of America - in many ways its very heart - after an earlier era in which, as in Europe, it was certainly indifferent and may even have been at times inimical to the search for talent, has come once again to raise a powerful and compelling demand for the highest talent available - and a demand that will be insatiable, for the process of industrial growth is self-accelerative. As the status of the worker is raised by the technology of a dynamic society, that technology itself is expanded, and the demand that it makes for ever larger numbers of more highly trained talent is increased in this autocatalytic process. The supply can probably never, in the nature of things, exceed the demand, now that the trend is powerfully under way.

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As in industry, so in the other phases of domestic American life. A cadre of ability builds its own niches, creates its own opportunities and demands for more ability - a process so exponential that only stagnation or decline in the national life can arrest it.

These domestic demands for a continued and accelerated supply of manpower of excellent talent and training would be a compelling enough reason for the nation to put as its issue of highest priority their discovery and their nurture. Added to them are all the other powerful factors which a changed position of American world leadership has brought. Not least among these, of course, is the existence of a power bloc which we cannot but regard much in the light that Islam was regarded in the tenth century in western Europe, and which offers us the keenest competition in the discovery and development of gifted manpower. These reasons, too, are compelling, but they are by no means so basic as those posed by the requirements of our own continuing national health. They do provide one among many immediate challenges, one among many immediate yardsticks, as spurs to an effort which in any case we should strain every nerve to make.

This aspect of industrial America in the twentieth century is a heartening one. There is much reason to think that there will be an ever-increasing demand for high talent, which will force us to face squarely the problem of its adequate discovery and creation. In this process, many of the problems of a continued satisfying development for the individual will be met.

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# The Effects of Consumption

But there are some other aspects that will require much more careful thought and action. And about which we must be less sanguine. One of these, clearly, is the problem of consumption, and of the subtler effects that it may have on us.

It is obvious that if we are to maintain those traditions which are so deeply rooted in our history and which it is inconceivable that we should now abandon - the traditions of the worth and the prerogative and the independence of the invididual in his state, of his right to a maximum of "elbow-room" for individual initiative - we must maintain a dynamic industrial structure. The problem of what to do with the product of that structure, when it has become massive enough to do much more than supply the basic living needs of a nation, is a relatively new one to America. It is obvious that consumption must be encouraged to the limit that competitive advertisement makes possible. Yet how is maximum individual consumption to be equated, in the mind of the individual American, with the standards of competitive creative work that comes out of the American tradition - standards so deeply rooted and so fundamental that, deprived of them, the individual is likely to be profoundly unhappy, as well as dangerously adrift? Our principal desire is to call attention to the grave seriousness of this problem for America in the second half of the twentieth century - not to attempt the colossal task of answering the question, which will require many minds and many years, if it is to be achieved at all.

What little thinking toward an answer we have been able to do is suggested in a later section. (See "Attitudes and Goals")

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A second major problem posed by the modern American scene is of
course the extraordinarily high degree of organization within it, and the nature
of that organization. In the old American ethos the individual worker was the
competitive unit on which the figure of merit of the enterprise was written,
and he remained as the competitive unit well into the later eras of American
business. So long as this was true, the tradition of the competitive individual
that has its roots in the days of the frontier, far from being opposed, was
further strengthened. Only when the evolution of American business and
industry had progressed to the point where the group structure supplanted the
individual as the adaptive unit in competition - as must happen at some point
in all evolving organization of living things, whether human or infra-human -
was the ideal of the effective, competitive individual, which we would have
regarded as the very corner-stone of our national philosophy, seriously prag-
matically challenged. Today it is most severely challenged by the very nature
of our national organization. This challenge is not to be explained away or to
be evaded - it is there, by the very nature of the events which have made us
great and of the structure which now must preserve and defend us. How to
meet it has the most serious bearing on the effective use of our manpower.
Here again we wish only to call attention to the magnitude and the seriousness
of the problem in the maintenance of the vitality of the whole American tradition.
Such positive thoughts as we have had on the matter are set forth later.

Underlying these problems as a deeper cause - and perhaps in part a

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deeper consequence - is an ambivalence of attitude in our nation which is best characterized, perhaps, as the tug-of-war in our estimation between equality and excellence - a fundamental seeming paradox of the American scene. All of our early historical background and the later modifications of our development have deeply and irrevocably set the condition that in our society performance is the primary determinant of status. It is a corollary of the early frontier society, of the individual competition, of the lack of stratification, that in our society the future of an individual depends to an extraordinary degree upon his native girts, and the young man or woman entering on a career, and his family around him, and his associates at large are deeply, if often subconsciously, aware of this. But if our American society, on the one hand, is deeply-committed to the notion of "Let the best man win", it is also the society which, perhaps more than any other in the world, is merciful to the loser, and, in that compassion, permits him to rewrite the rules of the game to an unprecedented degree. Thus there is set up that ambivalence of attitudes which is often interpreted as the competition between standards of excellence and standards of equality with the mediocrity which the latter, literally interpreted, must involve. The understanding of that ambivalence, and the treatment of it so that the best harvest can be reaped from all the levels of talent and performance, will be perhaps the most fundamental of all the challenges to American education in the future. We shall have more to say of it in the next section.

These profound questions underline once again the tremendous task of

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The Central Importance of Education

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The profound questions underlined in the last chapter, section emphasize once again the tremendous century of education in the future America of the twentieth century. For not only must our educational system, taken in the most inclusive context, meet that most obvious, yet tremendous, challenge - to be the source of the varied skills that our national life demands. It must do far more. Considered in the broad milieu of the combination of home environment and home training, on the one hand, and of formal educational structure on the other, it must act as the disseminator and the preserver of our deepest ideals of values and of goals, and our deepest source of individual self-respect. It must serve as the primary molder of tastes, the maintainer of high value standards of intellectual life.

We must look to our educational patterns, if anywhere, for the solution to the problem of how the old ethos of individual competition, and the keenness, the sharpening of edge, the joy of accomplishment and the sense of individual self-justification that accompany it - can find convincing and effective outlets in a world where group-competition is now so much the rule, and of how the whole ethos can be preserved from the perversions that threaten it. It is to education that we must look, primarily, to redress the balance between equality and excellence, without sacrifice of either. And if education can successfully meet these formidable challenges, it will have found that its very success has created new problems - the problems always inherent in self-accelerating growth. We cannot think too deeply or too long about this key problem in our national life - how to find and use our resource of talented manpower most efficiently - how to educate it and prepare it with the greatest possible effect-iveness for its multifarious tasks in the social structure.

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Education

The most salient element in the whole problem of American education at mid-century is the absolute certainty of the inadequacy of present facilities to meet the present challenge -- to say nothing of the immensely greater challenge that will be posed in the next decades -- of adequately discovering and adequately training the nation's gifted manpower.

This inadequacy touches every department of the educational process -- inadequacy of present physical capacity at every level, inadequacy of adequate teaching staff, both in terms of numbers and quality, inadequacy of incentives to the teaching profession, inadequacy of effective use of aids, human and mechanical, to teaching. Greatest of all is the challenge to a new public image of and public attitude toward the educational process.

For it cannot be emphasized too strongly that, quite apart from the enormous job of architecting an adequate educational approach for the coming years, the finances required for the execution of it must be of such magnitude that they can only be publicly provided. Thoroughgoing analysis of the needs, therefore, and public education concerning them are the two essential first steps in the process. Both are tasks of immense magnitude in themselves, and they are of the highest urgency in point of time.

At the very core of the educational problem, of course, lies the question of adequate teaching -- a problem at present far from met. The great shortage of teachers in the nation is gradually becoming generally recognized -- a deficiency both of quantity and quality, acute at present,

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certain to become more acute in the future.

Central to the whole problem is the status of the teacher in society -- primarily in terms of appreciation and prestige and the opportunity to do as vital and inspiring a job as he may be capable of; secondarily (and of course closely linked to the first) in relation to his monetary reward. It is more than clear that, at present, the position is highly unsatisfactory in both its aspects. Overcrowding of educational facilities, lack of appropriate status and of monetary reward, all play their part in pauperizing the supply of present and future teachers both in quantity and quality.

This of course is but a truism. Meeting the difficulties will require the closest kind of analysis of the great number of facets in the complex problem, many of which depend *en echelon* upon one another for solution. It is quite clear, for instance, that there are large untapped resources of teachers of high quality among many sectors of our people. The most notable, perhaps, is to be found among the very many highly capable women, relatively young in years, who have been freed of immediate household responsibilities at an age when they are approaching their prime for vocations in other fields, thanks to the pattern of early marriages and early families that is becoming so well established in the present generation. A further important supply is still to be tapped among population minorities, especially those of a racial character. This latter source is especially important because of the related need to upgrade the quality of teaching

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among such minorities.

The question of teacher training and teacher qualification is as acute as that of teacher shortage. The whole matter of recruitment of teaching talent of its education, of its certification, and of its assignment to appropriate tasks is in great need of careful investigation and study, for there is abundant evidence that many of the present patterns have become outworn and stereotyped, and contribute not a little toward vitiating the standards that should be maintained.

A further reservoir of human resources in the teaching field has been tapped just enough to indicate how fertile it may be if properly exploited. This is the resource of the "teaching aide" -- the superior, mature, and interested student who is quite capable of assuming a part of the teaching function and, where the system has been attempted, has often discharged it brilliantly.

Finally, the place of mechanical aids in the teaching process is a subject of great potential importance which has never really been adequately investigated. There are associated complications, of course, both human and professional, and they will vary enormously in differing situations. But a more thorough understanding of the whole matter is badly required.

At the substantive level, of course, the basic problem is to ensure that at least the upper quarter of the talented manpower of the nation receives formal advanced training. It is equally important that the facilities available

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for this training be diverse, not only in subject material but also, for reasons
later to be considered, even in level of challenge. Shabby and low-quality
education must be reduced to the minimum possible, and this calls for
extraordinary effort in the matter of college accreditation. At the same time,
the requirement of diversity and the shortage of educational facilities
relative to the demand strongly suggests that great attention be given to
salvaging low-quality institutions wherever possible, and making them
"accreditable" -- itself an extremely complex task.

There are many innovations of organization in college education
which can be fertile subjects of experiment in the coming years. They include
widespread coeducational facilities, joint planning among educational in-
stitutions, including the device of the cooperative colleges, just now
becoming the subject of early trial, and the sharing of a teaching and a
student body among a number of institutions. The problem of the dichotomy,
if it is a dichotomy, between the needs of the generalist and the specialist,
and how to combine them, is a central question for education, and will
clearly become even more so in the future. Pioneering in this field is
already under way in some of our greater institutions, and must become
more widespread in the succeeding decades.

The importance of adequate guidance counselling, and of suitable
psychological and psychiatric help at the college level, has impressed us
very deeply. On it may devolve a substantial portion of responsibility

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for the discovery and the protection of latent talent, and for directing it
into the most profitable ways.

These are but a few of the staggering substantive problems which
must face education in the coming decades. Behind them, however, there
lies a much deeper one upon which all of the others -- and, in a large
measure, the whole shape of the educational picture in the future -- must
depend. Like so many basic issues, it is a question of attitude: the attitude
which the American people will finally adopt toward the questions of quantity
and quality in college education, and of who, and of what proportion, of
the nation's youth go to college.

We are beset here by the ambivalences of view, as yet unresolved
that were mentioned earlier. On the one hand, we believe in backing
the best man in fair and individual competition, in applauding him, in
giving him further opportunity when he wins. Our ethos here is the standard
of excellence. On the other, we are merciful to the loser -- we inherently
recognize that the loser in one kind of contest is the potential winner in
another, and that no one can say arbitrarily who and what abilities are not
required in the American scene, where vitality is so closely linked with
diversity. But our reaction goes further -- to the point of denying that the
particular contest involved has been lost -- to the point of allowing the
loser to rewrite the rules. And so, on occasion, we may enthrone the forces
of organized protection against competition and against excellence, the forces --

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always present in any society and necessarily particularly prominent in
a democracy with a minimum of stratification -- of organized mediocrity.
We are aware of this difficulty, of course, and we commonly think of the
matter in competitive terms -- excellence vs. mediocrity, quality vs. numbers,
and so on.

The making of sharp dichotomies from continuously varying series
is a characteristic human failing. The making and the invoking of a dichotomy
of this kind in respect of education may be particularly unhelpful. For it
presupposes *one* kind of excellence, *one* kind of social usefulness, *one*
source of self respect -- the sort that is made possible by a college education.
And since maximum self-respect and maximum social usefulness are the
inalienable rights of every citizen in a democracy, it follows that it is
not only the inalienable right, but the absolute requirement, in terms of
morale, that every American youngster, whatever his tastes or his abilities,
ultimately go to college. Aside from the fact that such an end would be
most difficult to achieve in a practical sense, its inherent falsity to the
whole structure of the American society is evident. But it *cannot* be
evident to developing youngsters that a college education is only *one among
many* roads to social usefulness and self-respect -- and one of the more
specialized at that -- until the youngster's own family and the American
people and the American ethos as a whole has met this question squarely and
come to its own conclusion.

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It is that conclusion which will really shape the future of American education, for it will set the demands. Only when we have truly come to realize that social usefulness is attainable by the most diverse roads, varying with individual taste and background as much as individual ability, only when we have really enthroned the individual by genuinely giving precedence and prestige to what suits him best in the way of preparation, only when we have reached the level at which we can discard the stereotype of the college education as the universal standard for all youth who will do all the things in the society, when we have resolved the false dichotomy which so dominates us into its finer and subtler structure, will we be really prepared, spiritually and intellectually, to establish the demands and set the true course for American education in the future. It is a tremendous challenge to our national maturity of mind.

Attitudes and Goals

Throughout our deliberations, we have repeatedly reminded ourselves of those elements of the American ethos which were so deeply established at the nation's beginning and which we have retained so tenaciously - the sense of individualism, the lack of stratification in the society, the individual competition our sense of excellence which leads us to applaud the winner in the contest and to esteem him the more highly for his victory - *provided we are familiar with and can readily recognize the symbols in which the excellence of his accomplishment is couched* - and our essential pragmatism - so thorough that we sometimes fear that, even today, it may tend to slight some intellectual values. These

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qualities were initially developed in a frontier society. They are well adapted to a society which is fairly lowly organized, which is flexible, in which the individual accumulation of material capital is a markedly adaptive end. In a highly organized, densely populated, and predominantly consumer economy, some important adjustments are certainly necessary for the satisfactory equating of standards of individual performance - and hence the feeling of individual satisfaction - with the needs of the society without the sacrifice of important sectors of the ethos to which we are committed. One of the most important social problems before us - especially important to the maintenance of our psychological welfare - is to find the ways by which these adjustments can be made.

Certain adjustments, for better or worse, are taking place spontaneously -
ly in our time. There is some evidence that, with the filling of certain social
niches which has taken place, there have come some changes and possibly
some restrictions of goals. The newly increased emphasis on early marriages,
large families, some avoidance of unnecessarily demanding jobs and of too
much personal responsibility, a stress on material goods as indicators of
social status, the use of educational achievement for material rather than
intellectual gains, have all been noted as symptoms of an increasingly
materialistic, decreasingly adventurous society. The shortage of leaders in
American society is attributed to the same situation, and there can be no
doubt that a study of the attitudes of young people toward leadership and of

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the current popular images of leadership and leadership types is badly needed.

Indications of this sort may be deceiving, of course, for it is hard to judge their universality. It is yet harder to be sure that their meaning is correctly interpreted, and they should be reassessed at frequent intervals and by many observers. It is quite possible, for example, that they represent instead primarily a crude kind of adaptation. In a competitive situation such as we have visualized, it was inevitable that the tangible evidences of success should take high place. At first they took the form of food and land and farm appurtenances. Once these were generally achieved, and once a ceiling had been put on the western lands, a radical shift was required. That shift was made, perhaps, by continuing to lay great emphasis on the *fact* of competition, but substituting money for lands and fine farmhouses (or town houses) as the symbol of success in competition. This would imply that, once the subsistence level had passed, wealth served psychologically primarily as the symbol of successful competition in an "individual" framework, and not primarily for its value *per se*.

Now, with capital accumulation having approached the point at which it faces the same ceilings that overtook landed prosperity in another generation, we are confronted with a crisis in terms of individual motivation which may be more difficult, but is not, perhaps, any different in kind. The underlying belief in the value and the "worthwhileness" of individual excellence in some field is deeply graven on the American character. The problem now is, in a

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period of material plenty, what shall be its unique symbol?

This time the shift is not so simple as one from successful frontier survival to a prosperous farm to a large country house to a fat bank account to an important administrative position. This time it must take a longer step away from familiar things and the direction of the step is not widely apparent.

There are few more important questions than this of the symbols of success and of "causes" for individual motivation in the current American scene. It may well be that the puzzling and ambivalent psychological situation in which we now find ourselves - thanks to our very successes in the earlier modes - gives great new opportunities today to leadership in the field of intellectual excellence. There may be a tremendous and virtually untapped reservoir for satisfaction and happiness in America in the life of the mind.

But those who consider this problem will have to remember several things. If the life of the mind is to become an important new channel for the release of energies, there are going to be various awkward and ill-adapted efforts to find symbols for it that will fit into the older pattern. We may begin by assuming that not the game, but the winning of the game, is what counts. We may set store, for a long time, on dry symbols of intellectual success which as often distort the content (or fail to correspond with it) as they represent it. Those who feel deeply about intellectual quality may chafe hard at this. There may be times when shoddy but showy work will be rewarded, while more obscure and less self-seeking efforts remain in the shade. We may see excellence

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equated with prizes, and we may dislike this. But withal, this general development, which perhaps we can already see on the horizon, is not without hope. It may be the ladder, the scaffolding, by which a purer general approach can one day be achieved. If the old structure and the old motivations - precious in our national life - can be gradually molded and adapted to coincide with the facts and opportunities of our present social structure, the scale of popular values may go far toward adjusting itself to correspond. We may be on firmer ground again, and we may have succeeded in opening new channels to the expression of latent American energies in accordance with motivations and goals that are not, basically, too different from those which we have always known.

V
Other Areas of Importance
Problems of Space and Environment

Last but not least, one of the most important of the great complex of problems for the effective utilization of our manpower resources is that posed by the tremendous urbanization and, most recently, suburbanization which has recently characterized our nation. The existence of unrelieved areas of slums, such as occur in virtually all the great cities, represents a criminal waste of human as well as material resources, in the degree to which such areas not only discard, but actually degrade and pervert, manpower reserves of potential talent. Few problems are more important than those of slum clearance and slum improvement. The suburbanization of our great cities, again, poses all the problems of municipal administration contingent upon situations

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in which a large proportion of those who would be natural urban leaders now reside out of the cities and so cannot be expected to give their primary interest and allegiance to the maintenance of good conditions within them. To these are added all the further problems of human relations, and especially of the fates and the opportunities of minority groups, and of racial discrimination, that conditions in the great cities exacerbate so poignantly. And when to all this is finally added the alarming problems connected with the rapid diminution of available rural areas over much of the nation as the cities and the suburbs spread and coalesce, and as more and more land must be sacrificed to the essentially non-productive function of supporting an ever-increasing network of trunk highways, it is clear that the huge problems of urban and suburban planning bear directly on the utilization of human resources in our country, and that their impact must be very great.

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## 10. Urbanization and the Leadership Crisis

What makes the material as well as human deteriorations worse is the fact that all communities -- whether large or small -- must count heavily on volunteer civic leadership. But as the great majority of the so-called leadership strata -- the professional and business men and their families -- move into the suburbs, their civic efforts are directed at the improvement of the communities in which they reside while the cities, to which they commute for work and entertainment, begin to feel the neglect.

This calls for a systematic re-vitalizing of the civic leadership in the cities. There is probably no easy solution. But a step in the right direction would be a decentralization of civic and educational control in the cities. The very size of the cities discourages citizen participation in the running of their affairs. For instance, school board meetings in the large cities can rarely count on the kind of citizen attendance and pressures which assure the smaller towns and suburbs of far better financial support and far more communitywide planning. It is quite conceivable that the boards of education in the large cities may have to be broken down into smaller neighborhoods, each with very specific and real powers, so that the people's interest and imagination will lead to greater support and more adequate planning.

## 11. The Use of the Talents of Women in the Manpower Pool

There can be no discussion of the future of the manpower supply and of its proper utilization without concern about the specific problem of using

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the talents of women. If teachers and schools are important, the part to be played in the development of new values and attitudes by women is even more basic since women carry a social responsibility in the upbringing of children and the shaping of family activities.

This means they are automatically placed at the control center for the transmission of values. The intellectual and spiritual influence of the mother in the most impressionable years of the child's life cannot be over-estimated but this is only one facet of the problem. Beyond this the overall manpower picture of the nation cannot be fully drawn without complete understanding of the part that is now being played by women, a part that potentially can be increased many times over.

It has been pointed out earlier that the new pattern of early marriage has drastically affected the entire panorama of American society. What this means specifically is that the period of fairly rigid confinement to the home has been telescoped into a relatively short number of years in most women's lives. The time which includes childbearing and early childhood supervision now falls largely within the ages of the late teens and the early thirties. This opens up a long stretch of years during which women are available for vocational and professional services within the overall manpower pool, practically without any limitations other than those which have been set by tradition and social pattern. Education, therefore, must recognize that in the new family pattern, the children will be in nursery school by the time the average mother is 32 years old. During the mother's 40's the children will

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have left school and the home offering the mother a full life still ahead of her.

This requires a changed attitude towards the training of women for
the higher echelons of industry, business and government. All of this calls
for an end to many of the stereotypes concerning age and sex, if a maximum
of the potential of women power is to be added to the human resources pool
of the nation.

It is particularly important that a new flexibility as to hours of work
may make possible the inclusion in the work force of women who are now forced
to spend all their time with household duties.

Some interesting and constructive approaches to this problem are now
being made in some communities. Most recently the Parent-Teacher Association
of the small town of Stratford, Connecticut, has organized a house-to-house
canvassing campaign to tell every housewife about potential opportunities
in teaching and about the specific requirements for both training and re-
training in this field. It is perhaps a measure of the great source of latent
talent that this search in a small town and not just one limited professional
field has turned out between 100 - 200 potential teachers.

It would, of course, be unrealistic not to admit that women are in
many areas of employment not judged on an equal level with men. In other
words, there are still many instances where the male applicant for a particular
job is given preference, even if all the specific qualifications for the job
are the same. Considerable research might still be done to find out what

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are the causes for such attitudes and also what real adjustments in the employment pattern might have to be made in order to utilize the available women power and its talents more fully.

These are but a few of the aspects of the tremendous complex of problems with which we are faced today in considering the effective utilization of the manpower resources of the United States. We have felt it far more important to try to ask questions than to try to answer them at this stage of our thinking. Among them all, we feel, none are perhaps quite so important, none, perhaps, deserve quite so high a priority in our thinking, as those concerned with the future of American education.

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# Summary of Findings and Recommendations

As has been pointed out at the beginning of this Report, no discussion of the future of American manpower and education could possibly aim at prescribing a set of solutions, or even at identifying all the problems without defeating its own purpose. The best that can be done is to establish a framework for continued examination and constant reappraisal. To reduce this continuing process to manageable proportions, the following checklist of principal findings and recommendations of the Panel are listed.

1. The varied gifts and talents of young people must be sought and nurtured more aggressively. This must be done with the intent of identifying and appraising all kinds of talent. Once identified, these able youngsters must be given every benefit of guidance and inspiration. Ideally, therefore, every teacher and every adult person in a supervisory position should be a talent scout and voluntary guide.

2. We must seek an understanding of the barriers which now prevent the full development of each individual's potential then we must remove the barriers. This means --

a. Augmented scholarships and loan programs to reduce economic barriers.

b. A study of the emotional difficulties which disable a portion of the nation's most promising people.

c. A better understanding of the factors which motivate and spark young people to the full use of their powers.

3. Education must receive immesurably greater support both in dollars and in citizen interest in participation. This calls for a revision of the 19th Century view that education is a luxury. It must lead to the recognition that in our kind of society (and in the struggle both for survival of continued

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prosperity and national sanity), education is a bedrock neces-
sity.

4. The educational system must be overhauled to meet the enormously heavy demands it is facing. This involves action on many fronts.

a. A new approach to staffing based on the recognition that there are never enough really superior teachers. We must re-examine our utilization of good teachers and explore new ways of using them more effectively. We must enhance the status of our teachers and improve their compensation so that they are no longer in the position of having shared least in the greater economic rewards available to our people.

b. The effective use of independent work must replace much of the spoonfeeding of students at every level.

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c. We need more experimentation in education, especially at the college level. We share the view expressed by the President's Committee on Education Beyond the High School that "great good for all higher education might come from the establishment of a few highly experimental colleges which could test out radically new methods of achieving better utilization of faculty and space, unfettered by traditional campus practices.

d. Attention is being focused today on the college student as never before in American history. Curricula, scholarships, admission criteria, etc., are all being minutely studied in order to do the best possible job in preparing the nation's youth for its role in society. Yet to really broaden their contributions educational institutions must have an increased understanding of human emotions. There is a notable deficiency on the part of faculty and administration, and for that matter in the general public, as to knowledge of personality factors, both of one's self and others.

e. Great progress has been made in recent years in the use of objective tests to measure scholastic aptitude and accomplishment. Methods of appraising will power, potential leadership, and personality have not comparably improved. We should marshal resources to launch a massive attack on the better measurement of the qualities, not only for admission to college but for placing people properly in industry and government. Especially is there need for better appraisal of executive potential.

f. While better pay is critically needed to strengthen the teaching profession, at the same time it should be remembered that emphasis on money alone is both misleading and unfair to the profession which is desperately in need of greater recognition of its intrinsic value and dignity.

5. The key to reconciliation of quality and quantity goals in education is differential treatment for the great diversity of human talent. It is particularly important that under the pressure of numbers we do not neglect the able student and that we constantly find better means of providing for the gifted with sacrificing the universality of education. We must evolve a full spectrum of different types of educational institutions geared to different types of talent, and to gain public acceptance of the view that such differentiation is not undemocratic.

6. We must do away with the misconception that adequate preparation for science and technical careers is incompatible with the sort of liberal education which should be the essential background for citizenship in the modern world. We can honor both objectives. We must recognize that science has become an essential ingredient of a level of education.

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7. Beyond the various levels of formal education we must make certain that manpower and particularly high talent manpower is wisely utilized. This means --

a. We must avoid the hoarding of manpower by industrial concerns.

b. We must find ways of salvaging able individuals who get into dead end streets in the course of their careers. This may call for the establishment of mid-career fellowships.

c. We must break through the barriers of custom and social attitude with the full realization of the potentialities of women as contributors to the manpower reservoir.

d. We must eliminate the obstacles which make it difficult for certain minority groups to make their full contribution.

e. We must recognize an inevitable conflict between the creativity of the individual and the pressures of organized life within big organizations. We must, therefore, press the individual to become part of this society of bigness without finding him-self submerged in it.

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8. Among the fields, not already mentioned, where there are growing needs for educated talent are the following:

Government service. We will require new incentives, a new willingness, and enhanced talent in the whole area of government service.

The responsibility of the U.S. as the leader and defender of Western Democracy has already imposed great new responsibilities, which will increasingly require skilled and wise management in the field of foreign affairs. The grave deficiencies we now have in the number of people who are motivated and prepared for foreign service means that we must not only make up for a backlog of demand in this area but move on to the creation of a new range of manpower assets qualified to perform effectively in discharging our international obligations. Universities must increase their capacity to educate men and women for foreign service.

Similarly, we may expect, for the foreseeable future, great requirements for manpower in the armed services of the nation. While the changing pattern of strategy and tactics may shift the requirements in the defense area for various kinds of manpower, we see no likelihood of a drastic reduction of manpower utilization in this area. Regardless of the numerical levels of the armed forces, those serving therein must necessarily be better educated, more skilled, and more thoroughly trained than at present. In the armed forces, as in other segments of our "non-profit economy" such

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as government and education, the real problem will be to
maintain and increase quality, as against mere numbers.

We may expect continuing changes in the distribution of
American workers among various occupations as, for example,
the steady shift from agricultural work to industrial work
and activities in the service areas. These changes and
accompanying shifts in population from rural to urban areas
will in turn impose new demands for leadership talent if the
growing urban populations are to benefit from a benign
environment.

The evolving role of science and technology in our
society will impose steadily increased requirements both for
more scientists, engineers and technicians of talent and for
a range of other professions of increasing talent in order to
effectively utilize changing technology. The growing require-
ments which will rest upon the managerial talent of industry
as industry becomes steadily more technological imposes an
ever greater demand for identification, preparation and
proper cultivation of executive talent--talent with the
capacity to build bridges between specialization and
generalization.

Along with these national needs which we believe to be clear
from the changing pattern of our society, we call attention to other
more specific needs; for example, the need for more men trained at
sub-professional levels to support and assist the highly skilled and
talented manpower which must lead the thought and the activities of
our nation.

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While the needs for technicians, for professional men and for specialists of all kinds will be steadily enlarged, we will have an even more urgent demand for the leaders who can perform the integrative coordinating functions of our society--the generalists who give cohesiveness to the specialization which a rapid accumulation of knowledge will constantly demand.

9. We must encourage the systematic study of our human resources by both governmental and non-governmental groups (universities and foundations). We need more knowledge and understanding of the multiple factors affecting the development of human resources and more recognition of the changing needs of our society for various orders of talent and skill. Moreover, our studies should include consideration of the competing needs and claims of various sectors of society and provide perspective on long-run as well as immediate manpower problems.

10. We must build more bridges between segments of society for the use of talented manpower in various areas. To this end, we should facilitate by various means the effective integration of the major sectors of society as regards the use of talented manpower by loans, leaves of absence, improved consulting arrangements and other devices as among business, government, and academic institutions. Particular attention should be paid to removing barriers and simplifying procedures to obtain talented consultants for government service.

11. We must seek to eradicate pronounced imbalances in the rewards for talented personnel as between the profit and non-profit sectors of our society by impressing upon leadership groups and the public

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at large the crucially important functions performed in the non-profit sector (education, government, religion, health, etc.) and the need to attract and hold a reasonable share of the nation's talent pool in these areas. In addition, we must recognize the improbability of attaining a real balance in the material field, and must search for less tangible rewards and incentives to public service.

12. Optimal manpower policy requires more concern with individual satisfaction and with adequate challenge. We stress this as more important than the need to compete with the Soviets or with our own past performance.

There remains this postscript. Those who plan for the future should seriously hope that the nation never has an over-bundance of trained and educated manpower. The only way an organization, a community or nation can ever attain a permanent way of life that is both challenging and exciting is always to be reaching ahead in a way that calls for more talent and more effort. If this sounds like a proposal for permanent strains and pressures, it must be recognized that only under conditions of striving can the human potential be appreciated and brought into full flowering.

## Variations and Embellishments

Our Subpanel discussion evoked a wide range of views
without always seeking to force these views into the mold of a
consensus. Our subject is too various to warrant reducing it
wholly to an agreed position. To give some of the flavor of our
uninhibited discussion and to record provocative ideas, not
otherwise stressed in this report we present the following
addenda.

## On Values and Objectives

(summary of Riesman paper without attribution)