Foot in the Door

It looks tomeasif The George Washington University (in Washington, D.C.) were helping to pioneer something whose long-range implications may be pretty important for a lot of us. What it implies, if I am right about it, is the beginning of the breakthrough in mass education, by using television. Of course, other institutions have been experimenting with television education, and on a grander scale. But George Washington’s project happens to be the one that I have seen close up; so I shall limit myself to it. The larger significance of this development seems scarcely possible to overrate. Among other mercies, if time and a fuller curriculum justify the general use of TV for teaching, that would seem to thrust a formidable foot into the Closing College Door.

By now, there cannot be many of us who are unfamiliar with that implacably Closing Door. Daily, and sometimes several times a day, it has been threatening to slam in our faces, or our children’s or grandchildren’s. The problem posed by the Closing College Door is due not only to our population explosion, but to the realization, abruptly brought home by those sky-writing Sputniks, etc., that: 1) a lot more Americans are going to have to be educated a lot better and more quickly than the past; and that 2) henceforth education bears directly on national security and possibly national survival. On the TV screen, we see a flutter of black and white flakes, rather like snow mixed with soot. This is radioactive fallout; and, any day now, an accompanying voice tells us, we may find ourselves in the midst of it. The voice is unruffled, almost cosy—nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice Teucro—as if you and I or the commentator were the kind of people who would ever let ourselves show surprise at a little radioactive fallout.

WC

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Whittaker Chambers

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It looks tomeasif The George Washington University (in Washington, D.C.) were helping to pioneer something whose long-range implications may be pretty important for a lot of us. What it implies, if I am right about it, is the beginning of the breakthrough in mass education, by using television. Of course, other institutions have been experimenting with television education, and on a grander scale. But George Washington’s project happens to be the one that I have seen close up; so I shall limit myself to it. The larger significance of this development seems scarcely possible to overrate. Among other mercies, if time and a fuller curriculum justify the general use of TV for teaching, that would seem to thrust a formidable foot into the Closing College Door.

By now, there cannot be many of us who are unfamiliar with that implacably Closing Door. Daily, and sometimes several times a day, it has been threatening to slam in our faces, or our children’s or grandchildren’s. The problem posed by the Closing College Door is due not only to our population explosion, but to the realization, abruptly brought home by those sky-writing Sputniks, etc., that: 1) a lot more Americans are going to have to be educated a lot better and more quickly than the past; and that 2) henceforth education bears directly on national security and possibly national survival. On the TV screen, we see a flutter of black and white flakes, rather like snow mixed with soot. This is radioactive fallout; and, any day now, an accompanying voice tells us, we may find ourselves in the midst of it. The voice is unruffled, almost cosy—nil desperandum Teucro duce et auspice Teucro—as if you and I or the commentator were the kind of people who would ever let ourselves show surprise at a little radioactive fallout.