Nationsal Scholastic Standard

A NATIONAL SCHOLASTIC STANDARD by Vice Admiral H. G. Rickover, U. S. Navy at the 30th Annual Meeting of the Alabama State Chamber of Commerce Mobile, Alabama Thursday, November 16, 1967

I am delighted to be here in the home territory of my good friend, George Andrews, and to speak to his many friends. I should like first to pay tribute to him and to the members of the Appropriations Committee of the House of Representatives. As the third ranking member of that Committee he reviews all programs that have to do with atomic matters.

The United States now has a nuclear fleet composed of 74 submarines, a nuclear aircraft carrier, a cruiser, and two frigates. In addition, we have under construction or authorized an aircraft carrier, three guided missile frigates, 32 attack type submarines, and a small submarine capable of exploring the ocean bottom. Much credit for this must be given to Congressman Andrews and to his colleagues.

I speak from personal experience when I say that without the support he and members of the Committee have unfailingly given it is doubtful we would now have a nuclear submarine Navy, which is a major factor in preserving our peace.

Congressman Andrews has constantly and wholeheartedly supported the Naval Reactors Program and has devoted much time and effort to helping us. It is a comfort to be able to go to him for his wisdom, his objectivity, and kindly advice. I am proud to be associated with so fine a gentleman and patriot who does such honor to his State.

Now to the topic of my speech: A NATIONAL SCHOLASTIC STANDARD.

It has long been evident to me that the absence of a standard handicaps American education. Our schools and the diplomas they award have always been qualitatively of the most amazing diversity. This was perhaps unavoidable in earlier times when Americans were still engaged in subduing a wilderness. Different parts of the country were then at different stages of development, and education, of course, reflects the state of culture. It was bound to be better in the long-settled communities along the Atlantic seaboard than in pioneer country. But today we are one nation technologically and culturally; we should be one nation in education as well. Our children's educational needs are the same whether they go to school in California or Maine, in Illinois or Alabama.

Everywhere, and at all times, a country's level of culture and technology sets the requirements for education. Of this, the men who direct our public school system seem to be but dimly aware. They subscribe to a philosophy of education, an ideology, which is at odds with reality. They recognize neither the educational needs of children in today's world, nor the reality of their diverse native endowments which necessarily determine what each can accomplish educationally. Nor do they have a clear concept of the basic purpose of a tax-supported public school system.

Schools do not exist in a vacuum. Nor are they set up to serve as laboratories for testing newfangled ideas dreamed up by theoretical educationists. They are established to supplement home, church, and community as educators of the young. Their primary task is intellectual education, a task no other agency can do. It matters not how well they serve children in other ways. They will have failed their purpose if they do not transmit to them the knowledge, and develop in them the intellectual skills that children must acquire if they are to become contributing members of their society.

How well then does American public education perform its primary task? Do our young people acquire at school the knowledge they need to understand our complex modern world, the intellectual skills they need to qualify for the kind of work that is available? Have they received the best preparation—commensurate with their ability and industry—for the responsibilities of adult life?

To meet these responsibilities they must have adequate knowledge in the areas of language, mathematics, science, government, history, and geography. Success in adult life—as an individual, a breadwinner, a citizen—is closely linked to the amount of education one acquires at school in these areas of basic knowledge. Have our children learned as much, have their minds been stretched as far as would have been the case had they gone to school in some other culturally and technically advanced country?

The world is now so small, so competitive. The economic and political position of nations is bound, in the long run, to reflect so accurately the quality of their people that what is achieved in foreign school systems can no longer be disregarded by us. There is a sort of international Plimsoll mark in education that sets a standard below which it is unsafe to let public education fall.

My work gives me a unique opportunity to judge the products of our schools. Over the last two decades, I have interviewed several thousand top graduates of the Naval Academy and of our best colleges who wished to enter the nuclear program as designers and builders or as operators of atomic-powered ships. I look for bright, well-educated young men with initiative and the ability to think for themselves. I find, though nearly all the applicants have excellent minds, disturbingly few qualify educationally. I constantly come up against the results of poor education; I see how much talent is wasted, how little progress has been made in education, despite the vast amount of thought and money we have expended in recent years. I find that technically the young men are better trained now, but their general education remains inadequate. The schools are letting us down at a time when the nation has urgent need of the developed intellectual resources of all the people.

Ours is the most complicated technical society in history. We live in a democracy, hence under the most difficult kind of political system, since it requires so much of each citizen. We need better educated people to manage our society, better educated citizens to assure that it will be well governed.

In the military, we are used to comparing ourselves with other countries, for we know it would be dangerous to let anyone get ahead of us. After extensively investigating school systems in other advanced countries, I must regretfully say that our competitive position in education vis-à-vis these countries is unsatisfactory. There are many reasons why our schools are less effective educators of the young than schools elsewhere, and I have spoken and written of them at length. Underlying them all and perpetuating them is our commitment to standardless comprehensive schooling.

Five years ago, I testified on English education before the House Appropriations Committee. The late Chairman Clarence Cannon asked by what means I thought Congress might help speed educational progress. My reply was: By establishing a National Standards Committee, and I outlined what kind of committee I thought it should be and what specific functions it should perform. In the preface he wrote to the published hearings, Mr. Cannon expressed the hope that they would "stimulate a national debate on the question of whether there shall be set up an agency of some kind to provide permissive national standards." Perhaps my remarks tonight will stimulate discussion; I hope they will induce you to give thought to this urgent matter.

It should be said first off that we are the only civilized country where public education operates without a national academic standard, where neither the names of educational institutions, nor their curricula, nor their diplomas or degrees represent a definitive and known standard of intellectual accomplishment. In Europe—the only area we need to be concerned with since the Europeans (including the Russians) are our only true competitors in public education—in Europe it is taken for granted that children must be tested against an objective standard before they are promoted. Otherwise, there might be gaps in knowledge, or repetition of subjects already studied, or children might embark on new programs before they are ready for them.

Educators and public alike are agreed that study programs must be carefully planned and that they must lead to a variety of educational goals, reflecting the variety of learning ability and of vocational objectives of their pupils. They are agreed that for efficient progress, programs must be sequential, each year building on what has been learned in the preceding one, each phase of schooling articulating closely with the one below and above it—as from primary to secondary and from the several secondary schools to vocational-professional schools, building upon the general education received at the secondary level. None of this would be possible if there were no national scholastic standard. Because all European schools concentrate on intellectual education, there are transfer possibilities all along the line for anyone who suddenly develops talents he had not previously shown, provided he is willing to make the effort to catch up with programs at a higher level.

Next to the greater length of the European as compared to the American school year, it is this close articulation in European public education that makes it possible for European children—all of them, bright, average, and slow—to reach any level of scholastic achievement at a much earlier age than ours. It also accounts for the fact that geographic inequalities due to different rates of economic progress in different parts of the country are not as pronounced there, and transfer from the schools of one locality to those of another is easier.

Though our children would greatly benefit from a national scholastic standard, the prospects are not good that we shall be able to obtain it for them. Theory and practice in American public education are strongly opposed to testing children against objective standards.

There is a school of thought which considers tests irrelevant to the process of becoming educated. But this, as one of England's university examiners aptly remarked, would be true only if one felt it "to be sufficient to expose the pupil to learning and undesirable to discover if there are any results." Many schoolmen object to achievement tests because some children would fail and this might injure their psyche. But in life, all of us are constantly tested against objective standards of performance; all of us at some time or another will fail a test. Would it not be better to let children discover at school what their abilities and limitations are, thus giving them experience in coming to terms with the truth about themselves before they have to face the demands of the adult world? Fewer young people would then need to be counseled by "career doctors."

I am inclined to think the main reason why our schoolmen oppose a national academic standard is that it contravenes the "Freudian" or "Social" ethic to which most of them are committed—an ethic which deprecates individual responsibility for what one makes of his life, and places responsibility on society. Those who accept this ethic tend to look upon education as a "right" possessed in equal measure by each child; in other words, a right with no conditions attached to it. It is not enough that there be equal educational opportunity; what is demanded is the right to higher education and to degrees without giving proof of qualification. Removing the price tag from higher education has had the curious effect in this country of transforming education into a sort of "consumer good" which a democratic society is expected to hand out equally—"fair shares for all."

People now differ more in what interests them and in the kind of entertainment they seek. The difference has little to do with money. Cost does not explain why only a tiny minority read the New York Times or the Atlantic Monthly while multitudes enjoy the comics. People now differ more in the kind of work they do. They differ more educationally. Some of the most vitally important work in our technically advanced society can be done only by persons who must be much more intelligent than most others and who have absorbed a far more intellectually demanding education than the majority of children are able or willing to pursue.

What our children need is not "common core" education leading to a single cultural pattern but diverse schooling suitable to their diverse talents and objectives. A genuinely "democratic" school system should encourage all kinds of individuals to run on all kinds of tracks. Slow teenagers need very intensive instruction in the fundamentals of education; bright ones should be getting into calculus, foreign languages, science, etc.; average ones should be encouraged to absorb as much of true secondary education as possible.

Practical necessity has forced the educational establishment to introduce some diversity into the comprehensive school. This has led to a uniquely American kind of secondary schooling in which there is a "common core" program, supplemented by "electives" chosen by the students. The common core program provides the "Education for All American Youth" that the schoolmen demand. Of necessity, it must be devoid of all intellectual content, so that all children may attend it together. It is a mishmash of courses in simple skills with which European schools do not concern themselves; they leave it to the home and to the experiences of life itself to provide young people with this sort of "life adjustment education." The electives are intended to provide diversified education. By leaving the choice to boys and girls, the schools abdicate their responsibility to guide the intellectual development of our youth.

The best compromise so far devised between the dogma of the schoolmen and the educational needs of the children is the multiple-track comprehensive school. Its drawback is that the school must be very large--instead of the several hundred pupils of European secondary schools, ours may have several thousand. This is not good for young people. Even college students resent having to obtain their education in gigantic "knowledge factories." Their sense of being "cheated" by the adult world is at the bottom of most of the student revolts on campuses across the nation. And the students are right. Educational gigantism has no justification in terms of the needs of students. Its only justification, whether in high school or in college, is the comprehensive dogma to which the adult world subscribes.

Though growing in number, multiple-track schools are still under attack as "undemocratic." Many schoolmen prefer to cope with the diversity of human intelligence by easing educational advancement of the less able. We have gone a long way toward automatic promotion and the granting of diplomas that are little more than certificates of attendance. Witness the following remarks of the superintendent of a large city school system: "Regardless of the variation of high school courses and the range of scholastic achievement...straight thinking and democratically minded school administrators have long since adopted the idea of the same diploma for all." He notes with approval, that high school diplomas no longer carry "the name of the course in which the student went through school."

I can see nothing "democratic" in promoting a child before he has mastered a prescribed course. He will only seem to move up the educational ladder. In reality he will be standing still on the same rung. Nor is there anything "democratic" in granting diplomas that meet no recognized standard. By not setting standards, we have brought our so-called higher education down to what Dr. Robert B. Davis of Syracuse University so aptly terms "creeping lowest denominatorism." All our diplomas and degrees have suffered the fate of paper money that is not backed by gold bullion. They have no intrinsic value. Their value can be ascertained only by checking on the institution that has issued them and the study course for which they were granted.

The process of down-leveling must somehow be stopped. This is what my proposal for a National Standards Committee is intended to do. Let me describe what I have in mind.

I suggested to the Congress that it be a small committee, composed of men of national stature and eminence--trustworthy, intelligent, scholarly, and devoted to the ideal of an American education second to none. The committee would have two tasks:

The first would be purely informational; it would act as an educational watchtower announcing danger when it saw it approaching. The members would keep under continuous scrutiny, and periodically report on the state of American education. Does it meet the needs of our times? Is it scholastically as good as education in countries at similar levels of culture and technology with whom we compete economically, politically, or militarily? How do American children compare in academic knowledge with children in Europe or Russia, say at age 12, or 16, or 18; taking, of course, into consideration different ability levels?

The committee's second task would be to formulate a national scholastic standard on the basis of its findings; a standard which would make us internationally competitive and would also respond to our specific domestic needs. The committee would do this by means of examinations set at different ability levels. No one would have to take them, but those who passed would receive national accreditation. The committee would in no way interfere with established institutions now granting diplomas or degrees. It would simply set up a higher standard, offer it to anyone who wished to meet it, and certify those who had successfully done so.

Neither the committee's informational nor its standard setting function would represent a radical departure from established practice. Many federal agencies collect and distribute information. We need a disinterested agency to tell us the unvarnished truth about the true state of American education. The committee would help prevent complacency and illusions of superiority, and thus save us from such painful shocks as Sputnik and other evidence of Russian scientific proficiency have given us in the past few years. There is precedent, too, for the committee's setting of permissive national standards. We have something very like it in the 1965 Water Pollution Act.

Under this legislation the federal government is authorized--if so requested by a state--to research and develop new methods of pollution control and to award grants-in-aid to localities and states wishing to use these federally established methods. We have here a national standard very much like the scholastic standard of the proposed committee, in that it is not imposed but merely offered as a service on a take it or leave it basis.

Let me interject a word here as to what I mean by the word "standard." It has, as you know, a number of different connotations. I use it in the sense that comes first to mind: a specific requirement or level of excellence deemed worthy of esteem or reward. Not a law, enforceable in the courts. Falling below standard does not put one in jail. Nor a conventional rule imposed by society. Failure to meet the standard does not get one socially ostracized. No one has to live up to the standard. It is simply an optional criterion for determining the value of an act or accomplishment. For those who accept the standard it becomes the yardstick by which the worth of these acts or accomplishments is determined.

Water pollution and mediocre education have this in common: they are problems that cannot be solved by local and state authorities alone, but require some assistance from the federal government. Population growth and technology threaten us with a severe water shortage unless we devise better means to preserve the quality of our water resources so that they may be used over and over again. Pollution abatement has therefore become a national problem, and we accept a new kind of federal aid, just as we accept federal aid for clean air and for automobile safety. I believe improvement of the quality of American education is at least as pressing as the need for an assured supply of clean water, pure air, or safe automobiles. Education is now the indispensable medium for survival and progress. Education is so basic to the quality of our national life that by steering it in the right direction we can change America's future; we can make it secure. To steer it right we need a new kind of federal aid--the kind of aid that the proposed National Standards Committee would offer.

I hope I may convince you that it would be entirely proper and exceedingly useful for us to have such an agency. Let me make it crystal clear that nothing in my proposal would violate the constitutional separation of powers between federal and state governments, nor go counter to our tradition of control of schools by the local community. I envisage the rendering of a service, not regulation in any way, shape, or manner. The proposed committee would not usurp the functions of any existing institution.

Its job would be to draw up national examinations going deeply into a candidate's true knowledge and intellectual caliber--not IBM graded multiple choice tests. I suggested to the Appropriations Committee that we might model them on the English national examinations which offer tests in many subjects. Students choose the subject and the level at which they wish to be examined. This is marked on their certificate which will list their so-called "passes."

Our committee might provide one set of examinations at the level appropriate for a high school graduate who aspires to enter a first-rate college; another set of examinations at the level of students who may wish to prepare for a semiprofessional or technician's job not requiring a bachelor degree but still requiring a good secondary schooling. Still another for graduates of various types of colleges, especially those bound for the teaching profession. I stress again that no one would need to take these examinations; but those who did pass them successfully would obtain national certification; perhaps the notation National Scholar stamped on their regular diplomas or degrees. The seal would clearly indicate what the holder had achieved.

There are many occasions when it is important to know what educational level a person has reached. Admissions officers of higher educational institutions or prospective employers have a valid reason for wanting to know what exactly are the qualifications of an applicant. Think how much time and money would be saved if his diploma or degree indicated this clearly! Everywhere abroad it is taken for granted that diplomas and degrees conform to a specific standard--a standard known to everyone. Setting the standard is not regarded as government intrusion or tyranny but as a welcome service to students, their parents, and the taxpayers who bear the cost of public education.

Everyone benefits when there is a standard. At one stroke it does away with misleading educational labels so that any layman has the means of judging whether a school or college is doing its job properly. By offering the reward of a certified diploma to our children, many who now drift through school would be encouraged to aspire to higher academic goals. You can't expect children to study hard subjects such as mathematics, science, and languages when next door others are effortlessly accumulating equal credits by easy life-adjustment courses in "Family Life." It surely isn't "undemocratic" to reward those who exert themselves with a diploma that takes note of their accomplishments. This is what certification by a National Standards Committee would do.

There is no question in my mind that a large sector of the American