The Myths of Our Intellectual Superiority

It is still difficult for many of us to believe that the Russians have a university better than any of our own. We have been assuming that our superior wealth would obtain a superior education for our children. But we have failed to devote more than a tiny fraction – at most 3% – of our national income for this purpose, as contrasted to the Soviets' 10%. We have taken pride in our American inventive genius. But we have too often applied it to gadgets and luxuries, while the Soviets intensified their basic research. We have jeered at Russian claims of being first in a variety of fields, from radio to baseball. But we now realize that their traditions of scientific genius are as fully developed as our own. We have comfortably assumed that Marxist dogma and totalitarian repression would produce only stultified minds and ridiculous theories (such as Lysenko's genetics). But tonight we are not laughing at the sputniks.

Even after the Communists demonstrated solid intellectual and scientific accomplishments, many Americans refused to recognize the reasons. It was easier to believe that these were all secrets stolen by Communist spies or extracted from captured German scientists. (Under this theory, we could have launched a satellite first if the Democratic Administration had only used carbon paper!) But our real regret is not that the Russians stole these secrets from us, but that we were unable to steal them from the Russians.

There are still others who are convinced that every Russian achievement is simply a crude imitation of our own. But the truth of the matter is that in many areas we are seeking to imitate the Russians. A year ago an American firm asked the Soviets for the right to manufacture a Russian-developed turbo-drill – it could dig oil wells through hard rock ten times as fast as any American drill. Our scientists admire the Soviet sputniks. Our aeronautical engineers envy their intercontinental jet bombers. Our atomic physicists were impressed by their atomic reactors – producing 5,000 kilowatts of commercial electric power – in operation nearly four years ago.

In short, we have badly deceived ourselves about Russian intellectual achievements. We have been complacent about our own supposed monopoly of know-how. We have been mistaken about their supposed ignorance. And we have completely failed to understand the crucial importance of intellectual achievements in the race for security and survival.

Education and the Cold War

I do not know whether the Battle of Waterloo was actually won on the playing-fields of Eton. But I do know that the struggle in which we are now engaged will be won or lost in the classrooms of America. The development and maintenance of a modern defensive force is directly related to the scientific talent available. We already know of our lag in satellites, in missiles, in jet engines and rocket fuels, in detection systems and other scientific essentials. Less well known is the fact that an estimated 9% of our tactical bombers have been kept out of service for lack of sufficient technical personnel. Others have simply not been produced. Production of a jet airplane requires 80 times the engineering manpower required for a fighter plane in 1940. Take another example: AEC Commissioner Libby says our greatest single deterrent to nuclear progress is a shortage of trained technicians. We are producing each year about one fourth as many atomic reactor technicians as we need. The opening of the space age, as Mr. Eisenhower has observed, dramatized deficiencies in our science education that have been with us for many years – though unfortunately it was Baltimore's Eisenhower (Milton), and not his brother in Washington, who made that statement.

Our lag in educational achievements is also costly in terms of scientific weapons. We are competing for international prestige and goodwill. Alexander Nesmeyanov, Chairman of the Soviet Academy of Science, has promised "great efforts … to beat the United States on all scientific fronts." While we rush to devote our efforts to matching their space satellite, they may score other major breakthroughs. We may hear about a Soviet cyclotron bigger than any in the free world. We may see a Communist atomic-powered ice breaker, or merchant vessel, or airplane. At the Brussels World's Fair, we may even be surpassed in such American specialties as electronic computers and automation for mass production. Or the Soviets may next gain world-wide prestige through some stunning success in biology, meteorology or oceanography.

But prestige alone is not at stake. The millions of uncommitted peoples who hold the key to the future live in the so-called underdeveloped areas. Their greatest need is not arms or propaganda or treaties. They need technicians and technical assistance. They want "know-how" and they want results. Russia's skilled technicians, Premier Bulganin told the Communist Party Congress, are its "gold reserve." Those technical experts are graduating by the millions under the current five-year plan, as many as the last two five-year plans combined. The Kremlin, which pays for their education, can send them anywhere in the world upon graduation. While we in the United States are unable to produce enough engineers and scientists to meet our own needs, Soviet technicians are pouring into the Middle East, Africa, Asia and even Latin America.

"We shall see," Mr. Khrushchev told Southeast Asia during his 1956 tour, "we shall see who has more engineers, the United States or the Soviet Union." In Burma, as in India, Khrushchev and Bulganin offered to build and staff a technological institute in Rangoon "as a gift to the people of Burma from the people of the Soviet Union."

Students from all of these areas are thronging to the University of Moscow and other excellent Russian institutions. We can hardly expect them to return home as dedicated missionaries for Western ideals. And Russian science may score an even more spectacular success if it devises and exports new ways of irrigating the desert, of exploiting the ocean bed, harnessing jungle rivers, or conquering the plagues afflicting these peoples for centuries.

Finally, our competition in education also affects our competition in the economic cold war – in the race for industrial supremacy – in countering the Soviet trade offensive. "A nation," Vannevar Bush said, "which depends upon others for its new basic scientific knowledge will be slow in its industrial progress and weak in its competitive position in world trade." In this country, even our dependence on others is limited by our lack of foreign language specialists. Up to one million scientific articles are published every year in languages other than English. Recently several American industrial laboratories spent five years and over $200,000 conducting studies of the design of electrical circuits. When they finished they discovered that this work had been done and described in a Soviet journal before their own studies had even started.

In Russia, on the other hand, John Gunther reports that there are more than 41 thousand teachers of English. The Russian ten-year curriculum includes six years of foreign language, from the fifth grade on – and English is the most popular choice.

It should be clear, in short, that victory – in the words of Sir David Eccles, President of the British Board of Trade – "will go to the people with the best system of education – both in the sciences and humanities."

Education in the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

Who has the best system of education today – the U.S. or the U.S.S.R.? Who will achieve this victory? Why are the Russians scoring now? Direct comparisons are difficult and in many ways meaningless. But let us at least be aware of what we are facing.

American students who finish high school complete 12 years of instruction – comparable Russian students receive only 10 years. But in those 10 years they receive more hours of instruction than American students receive in 12. They attend classes 6 days a week, 10 months a year. They do not enjoy the long summer vacations originated in our system in response to the needs of an agricultural society.

They have approximately 17 pupils per teacher, we have 27. Aside from some choice in the selection of foreign languages, they have no elective subjects. The 10-year curriculum includes – on a compulsory basis – 5 years of physics, 5 years of biology, 4 years of chemistry, 1 year of astronomy and 10 years of mathematics up to trigonometry and elementary calculus. Few, if any, 12-year curricula in America cover as much.

Atomic Energy Chairman Strauss has stated: "I can learn of no public high school in our country where a student obtains so thorough a preparation in sciences and mathematics, even if he seeks it – even if he should be a potential Einstein, Edison, Fermi or Bell." Only a small fraction of our high school graduates have had even one year of chemistry. An even smaller proportion have had one year of physics. In fact, more than half of our high schools do not teach any physics at all. In the last year for which statistics are available, we produced only 125 new physics teachers – although we have at least 28,000 high schools.

Our lag in mathematics is even more shocking.

A Russian child, I understand, learns how to use a slide-rule in the fifth grade. Their schools last year produced roughly 1½ million graduates with a thorough training in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry and elementary calculus. But we graduated less than 100,000 students with any background in advanced mathematics at all: One reason, perhaps, was revealed by the Education Testing Service.

A survey of 211 prospective elementary school teachers found that 150 of them had always hated arithmetic. A large proportion of our high schools offer no classes in advanced mathematics or even geometry whatsoever. In the words of Admiral Rickover: "It is time we face up to the fact that few American students at age 21 or 22 know as much after a 4-year college course as most European secondary school graduates know at age 18 or 19."

What are the facts on the college level? Russian college students receive on the average twice as many instruction hours as Americans. Their students are paid for going to school – their college education is furnished by the state – and their professors receive pay several times above that awarded most other occupations. As a result, Soviet enrollments in institutions of higher learning already exceed our own; and they are growing faster.

The Russians are graduating 10 times as many engineers as they did a generation ago – and at a rate 2½ times greater than the United States. They have enrolled and are graduating more scientists. Within five years, it is estimated, the Soviets will have three times as many scientists and engineers as we do. In addition, their technical institutions turn out tremendous numbers of engineering technicians. Though not full-fledged engineers, these technicians are invaluable in both the Soviet defense effort and foreign assistance program.

America, in short, as Edward Teller has so solemnly pointed out, has already lost the cold war of science.

If we begin now, we may regain our position in the 1980's or even the 1970's.
But the 1960's are already lost.

There is no point in talking about a "crash" program in education. Sputnik did not create this crisis and a "crash" program will not solve it. The tragic inadequacies of American education have been with us too long to be ended within a few years by a sudden acceleration of scholarship, teacher training, testing and counseling.

The structure of American education must be painstakingly rebuilt from the bottom up – with more and better schools, more and better teachers from the primary grades on. The Federal government must be willing to put into the construction of new public schools each year for the next several years at least as much as the cost of one aircraft carrier.

But the emphasis must not be on quantity alone – we will not turn out 50 thousand scientists like we produced 50 thousand planes for World War II. Nor must we correct our deficiencies only in the areas of mathematics and science. We are colossally ignorant today about other countries, other languages, other cultures and religions.

This is especially true in the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Many students who can identify all the wives of Henry the Eighth are ignorant of the great sweep of history in this vital era. Courses in life adjustment, square dancing and cooking for men will not do the job.

We must reverse those trends that see only four out of five of our top students finishing high school – and only two out of the five going on to college. We cannot continue to pay our college faculties and school teachers less for improving the minds of our children than we pay plumbers and steam fitters for improving our homes.

Much of the responsibility rests with the Federal government – for the construction of new facilities on the school and college level, for the financing of new scholarships, teaching materials and the rest. But the basic responsibility rests with you as parents of our future leaders and as citizens of a democracy under fire. If you prefer more effective detergents or longer tail fins over sending technicians to Latin America, our scientists will be meeting your requests. If you agree with our former Secretary of Defense that in pure research "you don't know what you are doing," then our scientists will emphasize more practical gadgets. If you scoff at intellectuals, harass scientists and reward only athletic achievements, then the future is very dark indeed.

But if, on the other hand, you and I and all of us demand a better education for all – for politicians as well as scientists – for diplomats as well as engineers – for all citizens in all occupations – then we may face the future with hope and with confidence. Let us not despair but act.

Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer but the right answer.
Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past – let us accept our own responsibility for the future.