Pupils Without Teachers

U.S. servicemen have a chance to end up as the best educated fighters in history. Last week the U.S. Armed Forces Institute (Usafi) was giving them that chance not only by correspondence courses (TIME, June 7) but also through its new self-teaching textbooks. It had evidence that fighters were grabbing the chance. To Usafi chief Colonel Francis Trow ("Franny") Spaulding (TIME, Feb. 7) had come from Italy this V-letter from his old Harvard contemporary Irving Chamberlin Whittemore, a Boston University psychologist transformed into an antiaircraft lieutenant colonel:

The afternoon mail brought the first assignments [of your your Institute stuff], . . . This old farmhouse we're using for a [Battalion Command Post] is constantly shaking from artillery firing on three sides of us and . . . we've been hearing heavy German concentrations land on the nearest village . . . since 4 a.m. . . . [You will get] an idea of the staff sergeant's enthusiasm when I say that he stopped reading his textbook only when our own batteries opened up on some Me-109s that were gyrating around overhead.

Usafi can supply servicemen with self-teaching texts in 15 major fields of high-school and basic college studies. Among the topics: physics, arithmetic, geometry, algebra, shorthand, automobile mechanics, bookkeeping. Beyond the Arctic Circle, in the Southwest Pacific and in other remote posts, where the rarity of mail deliveries makes correspondence study impracticable, servicemen lean heavily on the self-teachers.

Many of the books are successful products of commercial publishers, retooled by Army pedagogues and writers. Teacher-value is got into the books by simplifying language, adding helpful illustrations, frequent summaries, true & false tests. A physics self-teacher tells how to study gas diffusion without a laboratory: if a piece of cheese is boxed with a slice of raw onion for an hour or so, one bite of the cheese will show that gas gets around.

Horse Laughs. One of the liveliest books of the series is Usafi's English Grammar. Chief feature is a set of sparkling illustrations (see cut) by newspaper cartoonist Abner Dean. Before the reader gets to Chapter I he encounters a pretest for common errors that embodies horse laughs typical of the whole book:

Any soldier which has ever went to Fort Bragg know what the horse cavalry does to help the flowers around the barracks. They also knows that in that ground the green things don't grow by theirself.

Usafi's self-teaching program costs the G.I. $2 (covering any number of courses). On finishing a course, the G.I. may take a Usafi examination devised with the aid of a high-test tester, Ralph Winfred Tyler of the University of Chicago. If he wants to study further after discharge, he can submit evidence of his self-administered work to any high school or college for credit. Usafi's Madison, Wis. office can hardly meet the self-teaching demand. Examples of letters received:

> "Sir: What I need most to get ahead is to study vocabulary and to use the correct English when talking to a person. Sir: That is the subject that's keeping me down."

> "I fear the damn war will end before I even get a chance to enroll in all the electrical courses I want. . . ."

> ". . . In the desert . . . just about the only relaxation [is to study]."

The Dean. Usafi's Colonel Franny Spaulding is a long, lean, burning enthusiast for the job of teaching soldiers. When he burns hot enough he bursts out with "Godfrey!" Sometimes he even goes as far as "Gosh!" He is one of the fastest coffee-and-sandwich racers down the illimitable corridors of Washington's Pentagon Building. A pragmatic New Englander, he was Harvard's dean of education before the Army took him.

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