UMUC - European Division - Mason G Daly - Army Education Conference: The Uses of GED - June 4 1964 - Berchtesgaden, Germany

Europe;Hoffmann, RosemaryDr. Mason G. Daly Director European Division University of Maryland Berchteseaden June 4, 1964 Army Education Conference THE USES OF GED [General Education Development]: A Professional Manifesto After the presumptuous ring of that title, I believe I should fall back on scripture to bolster my courage and bless my purpose. I will take a few lines from Ecclesiastes, and hope it helps: To everything there is a season, a time to every purpose under heaven……. a time to keep and a time to cast away ……a time for silence ; a time to speak. I might argue that is is not seasonal at all to hold an education conference at this time, but there is purpose under heaven , I am told, in pairing conferences this week so that if one in particular is held in the Walker, the other has a better chance to make at the Berchtesgadener Hof, never mind Maryland registration week. Ecclesiastes would seem fairly relevant to GED in this time of keeping slots and of casting them away. You have given me a time to speak, and I am unable to keep silent about this absolutely remarkable time in GED history. Every sign I read points to the certainty that this is a time when just about everyone up in the Walker-Civilian Personnel conference and everyone down here in the valley-GED conference is speaking out about the purposes , practices , processes , and personnel of GED. So keep your seat belts buckled. I am joining in, and I am going to take you on a fairly lively ride, pointing to some of the signs as I see them. Educators 1n this "looking glass land" of education for the military -all of us , that is -to get anywhere must run twice as fast (or is it twice as s lowly) as any other educators. While all other populations to be educated promise to grow and grow, ours promises to diminish. If we do not turn into haggard educational hucksters , the boys up in the Walker will turn us into educational dodos, or, worse yet, send us home. Behind our facade of wildly fluctuating quarterly reports, that can never seem to be made to glitter, our slick-paper job descriptions, our education centers which must not look too much like cemeteries with lights , we discern here today in Berchtesgaden, not an auditorium full of happy people living in a society permeated with security, but a bunch of guys whose lives know much frustration and some fear, whose lives know the disruption of the dreaded musical chairs of civil service and most recently the big ruptures of reorganization; whose faces and bent backs show other evidences of professional and emotional ill health. We are all, let's face it, too middle-aged with cynicism and too full of wonder and worry about Warren Winstead's replacement, to be turned into smiling, smiling portraits of optimism and well-roundedness by any GED reorganization or middle­management courses at Bad Tolz. This GED in Europe would seem to be on the make. I t is being institutionalized as never before. It will no longer be a dangling, sometimes unstructured part of something else. So this is no time to keep silence in remembrance of things past. Rather it is a time to speak out, to join in the anatomy lesson on the GED "body politic." There are signs which summon us to a breakthrough. And , to continue my muddled metaphors , this is a time to sharpen definitions , puncture balloons , and put the new GED into clear perspective. Now just who am I to take off on such flights of metaphor and presumption. Well, I share a good sized shred of the same heritage. I stand in roughly the same place in the educational universe at this (I hope transcendent) hour of GED. I speak the same language. I suffer from many of the same insecurities. I am very much with you in your present "period of adjustment." I use the same PX's and get my liquor at the same class VI counter. I may have been overseas too long, but Ray Ehrensberger won't fix up a direct exchange, even if I were ready to give up my cheap Scotch. Furthermore, we, you and I, have had a long and still abiding, usually fruitful and warm (sometimes heated) fellowship in GED. I was never directly asked to give any advice or consent in the present GED metamorphosis; in fact , I haven't been asked , as much as I need it , to take some middle-management with you. Still, as is your generous way, you annually give me your platform and, as is my way, I am most at ease speaking about our imperative partnership, our perilous profession, our joint image, and our future destiny. It is most certainly not a time when you can hope to have me keep silence. I suggest the motto of this conference would better be stated: Changing Army Education in a Changing World. Although an argument might be formulated that the entrenched, long-tenured overseas educator doesn't welcome or risk change, there is some likelihood that the home-steading type most surely recognizes the change which is upon him; or, if he does not, he is so benumbed by cheap Scotch that he cannot effectively carry on decent guerrilla warfare against that change. He knows better than any newcomer this is not the Army of yesterday with its basics, its woefully under-educated officer corps, its segregated units, its hordes of draftees. He doesn't need to be fresh from Fort-something-or-other in CONUS to know that both the world and the Army are changing in dismaying, drastic ways . It doesn't take a nervous system somehow re-sensitized in the good old USA to tremble with awe and anticipation and anxiety about the shape of things to come. Only 6000 inducted this month. Married men exempted. Society's rejects funnelled into Johnson's new programs rather than the Army. Larger classes at the academies on the Hudson and in Colorado. Missiles instead of men. Co-existence as much as cold war. No wonder Warren Winstead got a new job. It isn't altogether true that history has swirled past us GEDers stuck off here too long in Europe - this distant, dark-side of the moon. It is no more true that new blood, high in stateside­contact-corpuscle-count will refresh and revitalize the old corpse, than it is generous to look upon new blood as a carrier of change, something as infectious and feared as Typhoid Mary. As I read the signs about the often over-simplified matter, there is far more likelihood we will all go home all at once (and heaven help the balance of stateside education then), than there is any likelihood that any civil service formula, even with computer magic , can circulate and rotate education advisors in and out of stateside and overseas jobs for the regular refreshing of ideas and for the lowering of the level of Scotch in the blood stream. Given the formula , the balance of job exchange necessary, the switch from Scotch and Schlitz might be effected with gratifying ease . But no civil service or military Einstein can come up with such a formula at such a time in this changing Army and this changing world. Or, so the signs seem to say to me. What is needed now, today, is a professional manifesto in GEO, a professional manifesto that accommodates new blood and old blood (there is no really significantly incompatible alcoholic Rh factor), a professional manifesto that gets on with what needs to be done to change Army education to fit a changing world. Go ahead and seek the elusive rotation formula, that's useful; but in the meantime let's grant that this old institution (GED) will be p6pulated for as long as it exists with many old timers, let's show that this old institution (GED) is not immovably moored to one place in time. It is just now being up-graded in organization so that all the old ones and all the new ones can experience strengthened status in our important calling, a status the military has not always been prepared to recognize, a status that is not yet fully assured. This old institution (GED) can, with any blood at all, break with at least some of its bleeding bureaucracy, eradicate at least some of its clinging obsolescence, and make this overseas military community, whatever its make-up and however changing its mission, a more intellectually integrated part of a fast changing world . I believe there is the professional poise in this auditorium , the potential for professional extension and for professional up-grading (and I don't mean GS grades, although any of that kind of up-grading is alright, too) to come up with a fairly decent professional manifesto . But it is right here, reference this poise , extension, up-grading in the profession, that I believe the old GED world is most like an Alice-in-Wonderland looking-glass land, most open to criticism. It does sometimes hump a long at twice the speed of other educational outfits to approximately stand still. It has sometimes let Europe seem like the dark side of the moon. It has sometimes let civil service strictures and slottage, military budgets and bumbling, make its professionals less imaginative, informed educators and more pale, palsied GS-somethings seeking safety in governmental sinecure. I hope it has the poise to prevent this happening in the now renovating GED structure. I hope it has the poise to show anyone that the way to better advisor-dom is not simply to exchange Mannheim , Germany , for Mountain Home , Idaho. The view from the education center is little changed. Same quarterly reports , same test s to keep locked in the safe , same counting of credits , just another tiresome university , same civil service regulations with the same bumpings and riffings and built-in anxieties , same distance to conventions and conferences because TDY money is always short , especially for civilians dealing in that intangible, education. We know very well the mere change of scene does not guarantee professional outlook or development. We know very well what we need as professionals is repeated contacts with our peers in adult education, attendance at professional conferences, hardly more distant from Mannheim than from Mountain Home, seminars about service needs in education, short and long exposures to the literature and thought in adult education in the United States and, for that matter, just across the channel in the United Kingdom. 6. In the new GED can’t there be a breakthrough for professional status and attitudes that shatters the strictures and budgeting for this kind of spending? Can't there be a breakthrough which challenges some of the existing fetish about professional up-grading through the tiresome adding up of education credits for education credits' sake, for the civil service point gate, never mind their irrelevance? Let's see a demand for education for the sake of professional relevance and up-dated knowledge, never mind the points. Let's get far out in a wonderful, but I think plausible and maybe even possible, professional land. Let's see, in the new structure, a budget for your own learning and professional extension. Why is it really so far out to demand what in industry and in some corners of government, and even here and there in universities, is commonplace and legislated for -subsidies and rebates and refund plans when real education takes place, when a conference or a course is attended, when a language is learned, when a talent is extended, when a profession is enriched and up-dated. Why is a final-semester or final-year plan not as valuable in an education advisor as it is in a uniformed man? Why indeed, must I sound outrageous when I say to hell with refreshing at Mountain Home, give the guy a sabbatical!? You see, don't you, what too many years of overseas ' Scotch can do? I've become a nut! So nutty, so hopped up, that I think even momentarily that the new GED should be manned by an elite corps of professionals who take this opportunity to build in a dynamic system of self-renewal, an elite corps of adult educators who do not allow themselves to be isolated from other adult educator s , who do not allow themselves to be stymi ed by the count down of regulations intended for clerk-typi sts in civil service, who can command the funds and the respect to bring stimulating educators into their midst, more regularly and more intimately, and for more than a thirty minute talk at a once-a -year Berchtesgaden do. I'm so charged up that I can even wonder why the system can't subsidize a Master's or Doctor’s degree for a deserving professional, by some kind of sabbatical release, reasonable financial aid, or at least by the encouragement of a slot held open for him. If your good man wants a year to do an MA at Middlebury in French, why lose him, and why let anyone say that MA warrants less support or adds less to an advisor’s worth than some statistical project e valuating toilet facilities, leading to a Master’s degree in junior high school principalship? Why can't the system send every professional in the ranks to one adult education conference stateside at least once every two years where contacts and ideas are enlarged; and I don't mean budgeting in the system for more TDY mileage for the top-dogs in the ranks , I mean for all of the ranks . Some fairly dulled eyes were lighted up with a real professional glow when a dozen or so of you by some budget miracle got back to Maryland's world­wide armed forces education conference a couple of years ago. What a shame and what a commentary on restrictive rules and restricted funds that Air Force in Europe can be represented at this good conference by only one man (although I'm relieved that someone around Europe is registering Maryland students this week ! ) What a fumbling instrument the new GED will be, if there is not enough professional poise and vision to up-grade every member with a decent and dynamic professional manifesto at this critical crossroads in its history . While the new GED is going about up-grading its status, as I am confident it will, I hope it will study its reflection in the eyes of the military, in the "looking glass land" of education within a military command, in particular the reflection of its position in the realm of priorities in that mysterious spelling-out of what is always called "the primary mission." The primary mission of this military community is, I am sure, spelled out in some sort of specifics about containment and cold war and readiness. How often you and I have had to bow to the command or commander who, with “primary mission" impunity and logic, has decided he had to dehydrate our activity because of our place in the priorities. We are always fair game when the cry "primary mission" goes forth. But we must be the ones, my friends, because we believe it, not because it is our living, to show the military that the primary mission is only in a matter of degree more self-contained and separate from the welfare and intelligence of its least component, the drafted GI, than it is self-contained and separate from the wisdom and intuition of one Robert MacNamara. (Talk about presumption! I have it, do I not?) Well, I really believe that we can get almost dead-center in that "primary mission" realm if we take a real professional stance, come out with a ringing professional manifesto. I really believe that the reinstitutionalized GED can switch itself from being about the most vulnerable element in this military community, to being one of the most vital elements in this military community - just as education is more and more considered the most vital element in national survival. The professional up-graded, then, a professional manifesto formulating, the reflection of the organization improved in the eyes of the military. What else is there to be done in changing this Army Education program to fit the changing world? Obviously, the uses of GED are always in need of re-examination and change, and obviously there is no better time than the present moment in GED history for setting up a system sensitive enough to constantly re-examine and change." Clark Kerr in his stimulating book, "The Uses of the University," finds in his California institution (undoubtedly the most dynamic system of higher education in the world today) that the educational balance is always changing and finds that this is the unbalancing reality that saves it all from stagnation. The Uses of his university shift, reshape, appear and disappear. Well, to point to the obvious, and to assert there is more similarity between this education system and that one than the borrowed title of my speech, let's speak out about some shifts, changing shapes, appearances and disappearances in the Uses of GED. The "timeless priorities" of this man's Army are not so timeless after all. New Uses will mold the good old GED and' the good old-timer in GED, if there is the guts, now that there is the organization to eliminate some non-essentials , and if there is the vision, now that there is a better looking-glass, to anticipate new essentials of the changing Army education in a changing world . Our courage to eradicate and eliminate, and our powers to anticipate, are not always reassuring. Sometimes some of us (and realize I am speaking of Marylanders and GEDers, quite interchangeable cohabitors of GED-wonderland), some of us are more caretakers of past practices than we are up-to-date educators; some of us are more civil-service office-holders than leaders in change. We do find ourselves bottlenecked in our own bureaucracy, miserably contemplating banal charts, and regulations and records and reporting and testing and crediting that hasn't changed a great deal in a couple of decades . And our powers of anticipation-yours and mine-are hardly phenomenal to judge by the number of Maryland classes we hopefully schedule and drearily cancel each term. (Sometimes I think we are yet going to introduce Mark Hopkin's classic learning situation in Maryland overseas -you know, the teacher at one end of the log, and one student on the other end). But although we know very well that we will never eradicate all of the bureaucratic nonsense and dodo practices and even dodos from our GED world, we hope that we now have, in the new structure, a chance to eradicate, we now have in the new structure a chance to anticipate, and shape still better Uses of GED. I am told that this process of experimentation, innovation, and essential change takes what industry and all outfits on the make, even respectable universities, call "research a d development." Research and development shapes the chrome on a Cadillac and it shapes the nose -cone for the trip to the moon; it reshapes the bosoms of America, and the Arctic gear of Little America; it shapes some of Harvard , much of California, and, from what I understand, all of Warren's new Florida school ; it shapes everything of the hard and soft sells of creature comforts in America , and promises to enter more vigorously into the hard and soft sells of the soul . The phrasemakers call for "research in depth," then call for innovation following rigorous experimentation and testing and validating. Then you come out with the new Mustang and hope mightily that it won't turn out to be an Edsel . Reorganized GED now, and in the foreseeable future, should face massive innovation and change such as it has never experienced in its distinguished career. I have the presumption to suggest it needs continuing research about its basic structure. As jarring as it may be, I hope you face continuing administrative reorganization, more musical education offices. You'll be in bad shape if you break old patterns only to fix new ones. There needs to be -there must be -a kind of "dynamics of planned change" built into your new system -because there must be a constant search for the best possible institutional arrangement of authority, responsibility, jobs, and personnel. The logic of some of your new districts and arrangement of personnel in them is not yet based on very great depth in research or development. They are, I have the presumption to trust, a starting arrangement subject to the dynamics of planned change, subject to further depth research and further innovation. What a travesty it will be if after a shake-down period you find that jealousies , little human kingdoms , the myopia of selfish motives , fix the new arrangement of GED into a calcified cluster of Edsel districts and Edsel centers . I have the presumption to ask, are your districts going to be dynamic centers for research and development into the proper Uses of GED, or are they going to be an arbitrary rearrangement of existing bureaucracy to enhance the status of the new superstructure? New ideas, new uses, new dimensions, new purposes, the re -examination and revision of old programs, re-treading and re-grouping of professionals you have. Surely the new GED outfit will make every new district a "research and development center,” each with separate projects and the common mission. Not busy work. Not more surveys. Real projects to find out real things. Real centers of resource. Real "professional programming," I think some management wags call it. Busy work by any other name is yet banal. Research and development just might be another name for survival for every one of us. One project I have the presumption to suggest [c]ould be piloted and pushed into the dimension of a resource center, which waits to be done in depth, is a project on post-service careers. Not post-retirement only, not just the usual tailspin around some middle-aged colonel who is about to retire, although you have woefully little that is up-to-date and helpful to him at most centers right now. What about the excitement, deserved attention it would draw to your purpose in life, your purpose in the military community, and especially, what about the greater service to America, by paying professional attention to the post­service careers of the 18-monther who is an unskilled, unteste