HAROLD G.

SHANE
University Professor of Education
Indiana University
Bloomington, Indiana

Education America: The

in

Next Twenty-five Years

I am very pleased and very happy to be with this group because of

my long-standing respect and appreciation for librarians. You cannot begin
to work on hundreds of publications many of them research-oriented
without being aware of the kind of selfless dedication that I have always
associated with librarians. I would like to share with you some general in-
formation about the future which I think is of common importance not only
to librarians, but to persons in all lines of work. I hope that you will make
allowances for some of the gaps in my knowledge with respect to the future
as it pertains to
library science. I will begin by reviewing my own experiences
in the field of future studies.
I would
like to share with you particularly the past five extremely excit-

ing years of my life. During that time I had a chance to work on a volume
entitled Educational Significance of the Future, which is based on interviews
with people such as Willis Harmon, personnel at the RAND
Corporation,
and a bit and discuss some of the insight I gained on
others. I will also digress
various questions about moral values in the future while working for a foun-
dation in St. Louis. Finally, I will discuss something of great interest to me
in the last year: the National Education Association (NEA) bicentennial

project on which I had a chance to work. This project was an attempt not
only to revise the seven cardinal principles of education in order to accom-
modate a new century, but also to probe the minds of approximately fifty
distinguished world citizens for answers to three questions: What is your
image of the world in the next twenty to twenty-five years? What aresome
of the educational responsibilities and imperatives that will confront an edu-

113
114 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

cator in the next twenty-five years? Do the old cardinal principles, where

they hold membership and are still valid, help to command the fundamental
processes? I will slight that last question because a 16-page special section
of Today's Education summarized the research, and NEA
is publishing
my
book called Curriculum Change Toward the 21st Century, on possible
changes in the structure, goals and processes in American education.
This is preamble, however, and without intending to patronize, and
recognizing that I have much to learn in the field myself, I would like to
share with you some of the things I learned about the methodical study of
the future. I will then shift my discussion to the images of tomorrow's world
and their implications for persons in education, especially those in the field
of library science. This is a big order and the problem is not whether I will

succeed, but how closely I will escape failure to cover these various points
in an hour's time.

Incidentally, I would like to justify the way in which I have turned

outside the profession to persons like Norman Cousins, Helvi Sipila (the
head of the Women's International Year) , Elise Boulding and many others
in myinquiries this last year. Back home in Indiana, we tell a story about an
interesting event that occurred in Kokomo. Monday through Friday, always
shortly before noon, the telephone company received a phone call from a
male voice asking for the time. Of course, in the informal atmosphere of a
relatively small town, the ladies and gentlemen on duty wondered who was
so invariably interested five days a week in the time of day. Finally the
supervisor, emboldened by curiosity, asked the caller if he would mind ex-
plaining why he always asked for the time. The Hoosier voice, in its rich
accents, said, "I'm Bill Smith over at the Kokomo Box Factory and it's my
duty to blow the noon whistle just on time, and everybody knows the tele-
phone company has the right time." As he listened for a moment for a re-
joinder, the supervisor's voice came over in a strangled fashion and said,
"Sweet Jesus, we have been setting our clock by your whistle for twenty
years!" That is supposed to be a true story, but my point, lest you forget the
point and remember the story (which would be a catastrophe in terms of
any intelligence of my message), is this: sometimes, in the field of education,
we tend one another
to talk to to set our own clocks, so to speak, by one
another's docks. That is one reason why, in looking ahead twenty years or so,
I felt itmade sense not only to interview some outstanding educationists such
as Ben Bloom and Bob Havighurst, but also to see what the David Rocke-
fellers, the Sir Walter Perrys (who currently have in the Open University

probably the most important experiment in English education), and others

had to say about the future.
Now I will turn back and plagiarize a title, African Genesis^ in order to
 EDUCATION IN AMERICA 115

explain how I became interested in futures research. I supervised a project

in the heartlands of Nigeria. One of our contracts was designed to see
what could be done with primarily illiterate populations to accelerate the

education so desperately needed in that area. One of the persons with whom
I worked was a RAND
employee. I had not then heard of futures research,
and when he told me it was his specialty, I asked him to tell me a little bit

about of the really striking things that he told me was a story of how
it. One
RAND, in the late 1950s, had answered the following question from the
Air Force. The Air Force wondered what the result would be of an atomic
or nuclear attack on the United States in the manner of Pearl Harbor. What
would the devastation be, and what would happen to the people in the
United States? In order to answer an unanswerable question, the RAND
staff made some early forms of videotapes which portrayed, from different

angles, the way a screen would look on a radar set as one moved from one
distant early warning station to another. They accumulated about thirty

tapes which recorded what people would have reported to the Supreme Air
Command in Colorado if there had been a real attack. They did so on the
basis of the blips that were simulated on the screen at the different centers
each one had to be different, of course, because of the different lines of
flight. This information was then collected and given to the Supreme Air
Command in Colorado, where it was announced that messages from the
thirty centers would at some time be piped into the communication system
as if they were taking place simultaneously. The Supreme Air Command per-
sonnel would then give orders indicating what counter-measures to take to

stop the ICBMs, the planes, etc.

The results were worked out through
probability analysis by computer,
and they were pretty grim. RAND Corporation found that 57 million Amer-
icans would be killed in such a sneak attack. On the basis of more recent
data which I received from a friend who is a brigadier at the Supreme Com-
mand, approximately 138 million Americans would be killed in such an
attack now, regardless of what might be done to defend them. Moreover,
this figure does not include the Mexicans and Canadians who might acci-

dentally be hit by radiation.

This dramatic story really inspired me and I began to look around to
see if Ihad been missing something all these years. I learned a number of
interesting things, including the fact that futures studies began in the 1700s.
Louis XIV, for example, uneasy about his teetering regime, commissioned
his foreign minister to study what France could do to mediate or influ-

ence the future and maintain the royal family line. He came up with what
he called "reason conjectures," and through his studies tried to establish:
(
1
)
with whom the French should make treaties, (
2 ) to whom members of
776 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

the noble family should be married, (3) who should be married to specific
dukes, etc., in order to attract the largest number of allies with the largest
number of soldiers who might then align themselves with the royal family.
Unfortunately, he made a mistake that many futurists have made he did not :

look for the exceptional, but merely a continuation of the status quo. He
therefore made no attempt to anticipate the unexpected (such as the forth-

coming French Revolution). Only the sans-culottes (the revolutionaries who

plundered Versailles and found this interesting document in the strongbox)
had a chance to study the report.
Modern futures studies began about 1942-43, although there is really
no way of pinning down that date. It was before the war effort had reached
its culmination that the event occurred that ended adolescence for human-
kind. At the University of Chicago, a group of the most able men and women
were gathered to devise a mathematical model which would later be trans-
lated into the atomic bomb. About two years before Hiroshima, on the basis
of their efforts to mediate and study the future, a group of Americans and
others celebrated the fact that they had successfully exploded the first com-

puterized model of an atomic bomb under the stands at Stagg Field. The
model later became the bomb that first hit Hiroshima and later Nagasaki.
By this time I had become extremely enchanted with the matter of
looking into the future. While reading an issue of Educational Horizons, I
came across a phrase that I had never heard before, but which I thought
was a marvelously descriptive term: "future shock." It is a term which is
very familiar now, of course, but was then written by a virtually unknown
author.

Having described this background, I will discuss four methodical devel-

opments in futures study that have occurred in the last fifteen years. Most
attempts to look ahead in the early 1960s were based on a linear projection.
Persons who studied the future at that time generally thought that the best

approach was to begin with the present and decide how various trends (e.g.,
oil depletion, population trends) could be translated into an image of ten
years hence, and what could be done in the meantime to adjust to it. By

1965, however, futurists began to think that this was not enough. They real-

ized that there was not any single future, but that the future was fan-shaped
and could take any of a variety of shapes, depending on our adjustment to
it. For
example, John Kennedy once said, "We will put a man on the moon";
this was a decision about the future which caused a particular future to be

realized. Almost everything happens for a reason, and this is certainly a case
in point. Between 1968 and 1970 futurists and thoughtful people were begin-

ning to see that there was more to the study of the future than a fan-shaped
future. They began to see that developments in the fields of physics, chemis-
 ED U CATION IN AMERICA 117

try and other disciplines paralleled the things happening, for instance, in
education. They saw that these developments overlapped and that we had
what called a "cross-impact situation." What was happening in holography,
is

for example, was going to influence what was happening in education.

In early 1975 the NEA Bicentennial Planning Committee decided to
review the seven basic random principles of education, and asked me to
interview a variety of people to get their opinions and solidify this informa-
tion. We gathered influential American educators, including Wilson Riles,
the state superintendent from California ; Ted Sizer, former dean at Harvard
and head of the School of Andover Louis Berman and Alvin Loving, Sr.
; ;

We
decided to ask those interviewed the three questions I mentioned
earlier: What is the world going to be like? What does this mean for edu-
cation? Are the old principles still valid? We also selected approximately 250

persons whose responses would be of interest to NEA, ranging from Muham-

med Ali to Nobel prize-winners. Among those we actually worked with were
people I have already mentioned (Helvi Sipila, Elise Boulding, Norman
Cousins) Patsy T. Mink, the congresswoman from Hawaii; Studs Terkel;
;

Jonas Salk; Norman Lear; Raul Castro, governor of Arizona; John Johnson,
editor and publisher of Ebony; and David Rockefeller. On the basis of the
views of these persons, about eight or nine characteristics of the future
in education were defined, to which I will now turn.
I am
reminded of something that Will Rogers said about American
schools back in the 1920swhen I broached the topic of scholarly education
with him: "The schools ain't what they used to be and they probably never
was." As you look at the images of tomorrow, I think one might say that the
"future ain't what it used to be and it probably never was," because we en-
visioned it in a totally different context in the 1930s and 1940s than we do
now.
One first things that became very clear from the eighty hours of
of the

tape produced was the fact that we are, unfortunately, reaching the end of
a hydrocarbon age and are not doing very much about it. We all know that
we have major energy crises that a child of two, by the time he reaches the
end of eighth grade, might very well find himself in a land bereft of all natu-
ral gas and oil at today's consumption rates, if we are totally on our own re-

sources. These consumption rates are fantastic. In 1975 we were using five
barrels of oil for every one barrel we had used twenty years earlier. Of 18
billion barrels used daily, 10 billion are imported and imports are increasing
at an alarming rate. Costs, of course, may go up between 5-10 percent and
30-40 percent, depending on how the oil-producing countries finally decide
to handle the problem.
Because of the automobile, this is a world totally different from the one
118 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

in which I grew up ; today, many people cannot shop without one. Not only
isthe decline of the hydrocarbon age important because of the way our auto-
mobiles trap us, but also because of the way in which oil relates to America's
agricultural mural. We
are the only nation with any significant grain exports
far more than Australia, Argentina and Canada combined. In fact, one
or two of our states produce more grain than all other exporting nations in
the world. This agricultural miracle is based to a substantial degree on the
use of petroleum-based fertilizers; thus, in a time when great hunger is in
the offing (according to persons like Theodore Hesburgh, chairman of the
board of World Development Corporation), we could have a double tragedy
here. Americans are presently using three times the energy per capita of the

Swiss, and twice the energy consumption of the West Germans. Although I
doubt all of these facts are new to you, the total composite is pretty shocking.
A corollary of this is the fact that we are very probably faced with the
need to contemplate a postextravagant society. I will not call it a postaffluent
society, but I do think that ours will become more a postextravagant than a
postindustrial society. This very clearly means that we can postpone and
delay, with parsimony, some of the problems ahead of us, but we simply
must develop a post-Pearl Harbor type of attack on the domestic problem
of energy. It is a major issue that is downplayed by most politicians, I think,

partly because of the present frustrating lack of any viable answers.

This postextravagant society is one in which there is a difficult and
subtle psychological problem that arises in the classroom. When my grand-
father was a young man working six and one-half days a week in Chicago,
he looked forward with longing to a world in which life would be a little
easier. I began many of the things that we as under-
to see people realize

graduates had clamored for in the last years of the depression. began to We
see not merely the political promise of a chicken in every pot, not just one
car in every garage, but two cars in every garage and sometimes the cata-
strophic problem of storing a snowmobile or boat in the garage along with the
two automobiles. We
reached a point early in the 1950s where every man,
woman and child in the United States could ride simultaneously (if not for
the traffic jams), because of the number of autos we had. In 1973-74, we
had 100 automobiles for every 4 the Russians had. We believed this kind of
material gain would end much of the anguish of the human spirit and we
were dead wrong. By the 1960s many young persons were demanding things
for which we had longed.
In one of his most recent writings, Bell talks about the revolution in
entitlements, where persons expect that the world owes them a living. This
kind of thing has an ominous note to it for an obvious reason. Many young
persons today are not motivated because, with the likelihood of employment
 EDUCATION IN AMERICA 119

insurance, guaranteed wages and other prospects, they do not face the chill
of hunger. Many bright young people, however, also realize that there is not

enough affluence to go around. Thus, there is neither the "carrot" nor the
"club," and Ican only hope for a careful, evolutionary revaluation of what
we believe in and what we are taught.
In addition to the concept of our moving into a postaffluent era, we will
very possibly find ourselves severely reappraising the "growth-is-good" process
that motivated us for as long as we have had industrial revolutions. We
might
look at Kurt Schumacher's idea that "small is beautiful."
In the matter of reexamining "growth-is-good," I had a rather fascinat-
ing dialogue with a former classmate of mine, Walter Heller, the Regents
Professor of Economics at the University of Minnesota, who is a distinguished
economist and was a major adviser, if not senior adviser, to both Johnson
and Kennedy. As we looked at the possible shape of the next twenty to fifty
years, we came up with a model showing that we would move into a cylin-
drical phase where the balance between outgo and input was more in line,
i.e. state. Approximately between 1995 and 2000, we need
a somewhat stable
to envision something like an inverted funnel at the top of that cylinder,
which would be a dynamic contraction of what we are using, and with a
narrower kind of cylinder going upward. This dynamic contraction relates
to our need to learn in the next twenty years how to do more with less.

Telstar, for example, which does a much better job of sending telephone calls
across the Atlantic than cables, has one-tenth ton of copper inside it; the
total number of cables needed to carry the same amount of traffic conven-

tionallyon the ocean floor would weigh 75,000 tons. In this period of dy-
namic we need not totally do without, but must learn how to make
infraction,
one-tenth ton do some of the work that 75,000 tons were required to do
earlier.

Rather than thinking only about how to miniaturize, how to work more
efficiently, we must also consider what is happening to our imports. An in-
dustrial nation like the United States needs to import thirteen basic ingredi-
ents, including iron, steel, coal, chromium, tin (from Rhodesia), oil (from
the Middle East), etc. In 1974-75 we imported approximately 50 percent of
materials listed above; by 1985, unless we find new domestic reserves, we will
be importing eleven of the thirteen at approximately a 50 percent level. This
suggests that we need not only to practice parsimony, but to rethink our
actions many times.
next point that seemed to characterize the dialogues we had with
The
our consultants was a frightening one. Most felt that we faced the pros-
fifty

pect of what I will call "regulated freedom" ; the opportunity to do what one
120 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

chooses something we have always prized in America was being recon-

sidered.
One man, for example, pointed out that the promises of social welfare
for more and more people were going to necessitate restrictions. If, according
to Wilbur Cohen, one of the midwives of the Social Security years, we are
to have guaranteed minimum wages, guaranteed employment, etc., a lot of
regulations and directions will undoubtedly be required by 1995. One of our
problems is to learn how to live with this without losing the freedoms which
we have always prized in this country.
Regulated freedom may very well become a threat as well as a need in
the next twenty to twenty-five years. It already has happened in a number of
countries. Margaret Mead said that we will probably have what is called a

"string-saving society," or one that will involve a great deal of recycling. We

must, if we want to leave something for our posterity, think of ourselves as
users rather than consumers.

couple of grim thoughts arise here, however. We have heard about

A
the population and about how we are being squeezed by numbers. I was
appalled by some of the information I received about the gravity of this
problem. I learned, for example, that after subtracting deaths from births,

we are adding 200,000 mouths per day to the world population, which means
a city the size of Houston every 10 days, and a state the size of South Dakota
or Montana every 4 days. This is a dangerous problem because of its expo-
nential quality. It was estimated that there were about 12 million human

beings alive in the year 10,000 B.C., about the population of greater London.
In the 1860s there were 1 billion human beings. In late 1975 or early 1976,
we passed our fourth billion. Demographic projections suggest that in view of
the number of women of child-bearing age and the rate at which the pop-
ulation is increasing, and assuming there are no changes in the next decade,

there will be 1 billion persons born between 1985 and 1994, making the

population almost 7 billion by 2001.

This is a catastrophe for a variety of reasons, but I will touch on only
one or two of them. Much of this growth is appearing in places that can
least afford and support it. Four of the five nations that produced al-
least
most one-half of enormous 200,000 additional mouths per day are Bang-
this

ladesh, India, Pakistan, and Indonesia and this is despite efforts on the
part of Indira Gandhi and others to try to cut back the population. Inciden-
tally, the country with the greatest rate of reproduction at the present time
is Mexico; 50 percent of the population of Mexico is fifteen years old or
younger. It has been estimated also that the number of Caribbean youth in
Mexico (Caribbean and Isthmanian states) will probably jump from around
1 7 to 35 million in the next twenty years. If we think we have many Latinos
 EDUCATION IN AMERICA 121

moving into the United States and no way of restricting the flow now, in the
1990s there will virtually be a constant movement unless we drastically
change our immigration policies and that is not going to be easy in a
world where we need mutual reciprocity and mutual support. Demographic
studies have also shown that in 1975, 1 million human beings starved to
death and 10 million suffered brain damage or permanent physical damage
because they did not have enough to eat in their first year of life, or because
their mothers were undernourished during their pregnancies. This is a catas-
trophic problem in light of the impact that persons who are defective
may
have upon the world's population problems. Of course, related to this are the
problems of hunger and population, the wear and tear on our globe, and the
serious problem of pollution.
Another item to be considered is the matter of emergent changes re-

garding our relationships with the third world. There are many persons in
the third world (sometimes also called the fourth or even fifth world) These .

nations are aware of the overconsumption of nations such as ours, and the
problems to which it leads. Merely redividing what we have on a completely

equitable basis does not provide a solution to that problem, either. Thus, we
must look very carefully at how we are going to handle this overconsumption.
Heilbroner remarked some years ago that if the typical American or Cana-
dian family were changed by some magical movement into a family typical
of 50 percent of the world's population, these persons would be stripped of

except one suit or one piece of clothing for every person and
all their clothes,

a pair of shoes for the father of the family. Journals and papers of all kinds
would disappear, all bank accounts would be destroyed, the house that people
lived in forgotten (the family will have moved into the tool shed behind the

house), and the nearest hospital facilities transformed into a clinic ten miles
away with only one trained midwife. You would also give the family an an-
nual income of $300, of which the father would pay $100 to the landlord
and another $100 to the usurious gentleman who loaned him the money for
seed, and keep $100 to support his family for 365 days. This is a very difficult
type of situation, and the third world is going to apply more and more pres-
sure, just as the oil-producing nations are doing.
There is a fishhook in this, however. In a paper that, to my knowledge,
has never been published, the president of the British Historical Association
pointed out that nations such as Iraq that are seeking to industrialize are
planning to increase their share of the world's gross national product (one
might call it the gross world product) from 7 percent to 25 percent by the
turn of the century. We might cheer that these nations will be able to live
better and we will thus have less to carry, but there is a danger in this. In
order to maintain our unemployment at its present level, we must increase
722 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

our own
productivity by 4 percent every year or, according to the Brookings
by 7 percent. Britain is in bad shape. Japan
Institution, Herman Kahn said
a few years ago that the next century might be Japan's century is in dire

These countries are now faced with an enormous amount of competi-

straits.

tion from Iran and Taiwan, and this fact could totally change the patterns
that the western world has known (industrially speaking) for the last 150

years. This is something that we will hear more about. These items ought to
be matters of public discussion, information and debate, but they are part
of the iceberg that never even surfaced in any of the political discussions that
I heard during the heated campaigns (possibly because there were only frus-

trating answers, temporarily, that could be given) .

Another item is the matter of some of the fiscal difficulties into which
we are drifting. One of our consultants, Wilbur Cohen, well known for his
work on Social Security legislation, told me flatly that, as matters now stand,
our Social Security system faces bankruptcy by 1980. It was never intended
to be actuarially sound, and vast additional sums have to be pulled from
somewhere. Originally there were seven workers for every pension; in 1973
there were 3.4 workers for every pension; and by 1985 there will be 2
workers for every pension.
The difficulties with Social Security point up another phenomenon the :

aging of America. Twenty years ago the median age of our population was
around 17 or 18 years of age, but between now and 1985 or 1990, the median
age will range from 25 to 35 years of age; and by the turn of the century,
there will be a 50 percent increase in the Gray Panthers, jumping from 20
to 30 million people. All of these people are going to have an enormous im-

pact on our lives, and the political impact will certainly be tremendous.
Nevertheless, these things are not yet seeping into our minds.
To compound the population problem, we are under considerable finan-
cial stress. In the past ten years the cost of social benefits has risen 738 per-

cent from $13.3 billion in 1964 to $111.5 billion in the fiscal year ending last
June. In addition, $108 billion was plowed into American public education;
$116 billion into various kinds of subsidies, such as Medicare; and the cost of
pensions for retired military personnel has been projected as $8 billion for
fiscal1979. Ironically, in 1937 during Roosevelt's administration, the total
cost of federal government payments for past, present and future wars was

only $1 million more than the cost of pensions for the ex-servicemen and
ex-servicewomen in the late 1970s and 1980s. Consequently, I foresee some
economic discomfort that I think is going to be pretty difficult for us.
is one in which I think we can live with some belt-
In short, the world
which we need to live with a certain kind of insight
tightening, but one in
and understanding. There is little evidence yet, however, that we are in a
 EDUCATION IN AMERICA 123

position to encourage our legislators to support any type of future planning;

yet I know from reading the legislation that our legislators, at least a number
of them, are completely aware of these forecasts.

Despite the troubled kind of world that has been projected by the
persons I have consulted, there is a surprisingly gratifying, strong feeling
that we will make it. I will try to identify why, in view of all the gloom and

doom, people like Norman Cousins and Lear are optimistic. Although all of
these reasons are very speculative, of course, one reason is that human beings
have had a marvelous track record; they have had a high survival quotient
all these years, and there is no reason to suspect that they should suddenly

try to commit species suicide. Second, is the interesting point that David
Rockefeller made, i.e. a trend not necessarily a picture of reality, it is a
is

picture of what will happen if not mend our ways. If you will recall,
we do
Scrooge in Dickens's Christmas Carol says to the Ghost of Christmas-yet-to-
come, "Spirit, are these shadows of what must be or of what may be?" The
spirit does not answer, but Scrooge assumes that he can change, and he does
and Tiny Tim does not die.
In the same way, the various future reports have value because they
have alerted us to what can happen if pollution goes unchecked for another
fifty years; or to what will happen to food if population growth is unchecked.
This does not mean, however, that we are going to die on our backs. The
reports, as Rockefeller, Margaret Mead and others have repeatedly said,
merely suggest what we are challenged to do. Humans are adaptable and
would be stupid indeed to continue polluting to the point where we would
all be dead when we realize there are
ways to restrain it.
Another item that would seem to suggest optimism is the fact that we
do have time to avert disaster before it closes in on us. About twenty years
remain before we face the doing irreversible damage, in terms of
risk of

population, resource depletion, and in terms of living on a planet that would

be insupportable for most of its conceivably 8 or 9 billion inhabitants. This
time offers us years to make the social decisions more carefully, e.g., to deal
with the kind of legislation that Hubert Humphrey proposed about nine
months ago.
Another item, which I prefer not to consider as completely idiotic ideal-

ism, is that human beings are improvable and that this trend, if it continues,
will help us. In the year 1900, it was a pretty lousy world even in America.
Children slept under newspapers on the barges of New York; women were
little better than chattels for some years after that; people like my father-in-

law quit school out of necessity at the end or middle of fourth grade to work
as a breakerboy in the coal mines of Wilkes-Barre. Until about 1914, there
were youngsters in Illinois aged eight or nine working fourteen hours a day
124 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

under the most hazardous of circumstances, without any child labor laws to
protect them. Skipping to the present, today you would never find a presi-
dent saying "I took the canal!" as Teddy Roosevelt did; or a publisher like
Hearst fermenting the war with Spain, only to have us discover in 1976 that
the explosion that sank the Maine came from within and not from a torpedo
shot from the dock. We would not find, I think, the ideas of the League of
Nations being rejected. The diffusing of many of our problems at the present
time, I think, has a most important and optimistic impact on this.
Another reason for optimism is the fact that we still have a lot of clout.

One of the magazines I try to read rather lamely to see what others think of
us is the French Paris Match. The author of a recent article believed that
250 million Europeans have far less clout, in terms of what can be done,
than do 205 million Americans. The article went on to point out how well
we stood (by comparison) on wheat, cattle, electricity, computers, telephones,
etc. We can and will find the answers, and I think the lifestyles will not be
any worse than what I enjoyed in the 1920s.
I once asked Norman Cousins, "Are you an optimist or not?" His answer

that he is naturally led to the question, "All right, so why are you an opti-
mist?" He made an interesting observation which I think is important: "We
do not know enough yet to be pessimists." If we do not know that we are
damned, there is a chance that we can bootstrap ourselves up very well, and
I would like to believe that we will of course, we must.

Twenty years ago Maurice Chevalier, that very charismatic French

singer, was performing in a perfectly marvelous one-man show at the Shore-
ham in Washington, D.C. He was so good I saw it two nights in a row,
wondering, since he was so good the first night what he would do the second
night. Of course, I should have guessed he was like a videotape precisely the :

same routine, word for word. He told a story that I have never forgotten.
Asked by a reporter how it felt to be seventy-eight years old, Chevalier cocked
his straw hat over his eye and said, "I tell zem it is magnifique considering
ze alternative." I would like to suggest that we really do not have any alterna-
tive other than optimism in this situation. We do not know enough to be

pessimists. We have identified our problems and it is important to know the

answers.
I would like to turn to the future of education, and its responsibilities
and relevance for library science. The remarks
of three people interviewed
are of note here. Willis Harmon, an engineer and member of the Stanford
Educational Policies Research Center of Stanford Institute, answered the
question "What do you think of education and its responsibilities?" in this
way: "Education isgoing to be increasingly important during these next
forty years; but I am not sure about schooling." He went on to suggest that
 ED U CATION IN AMERICA 125

education would take place through media, library science indeed, the
whole realm to educate a much larger clientele than we have ever edu-
cated before.
The next man, Lester Russell Brown, an internationally known agrono-
mist and author of World Without Borders and In the Human Interest, took
me to lunch at the Cosmos Club in Washington, whose walls are lined with
pictures of Pultizer and Nobel prize-winners who are among its members.
Pointing to this distinguished assemblage, he said, "There probably isn't a
man or woman in this group who couldn't talk for an hour to a semester on
resource depletion, hunger .
," and he went on down the list. Not one of
. .

them learned it in schools; they learned from self-education, from libraries,

from television programs, from reading, from magazines. You must recognize
that agencies other than schools will have to carry in the next twenty years
the melancholy burden, as I believe he phrased it, of seeing that more people
the uneducated, the prejudiced, the biased, etc. get the word about
some of the things we needfor a decent twenty-first century.

Larry Cremin, president of Teacher's College, made a similar point. He

said that by 1995, the public may decide to put much of its money into

nonschooling activities, public service television, and expanded self-education

services such as libraries. He went on to say that he was concerned about the

way which the world was changing under the impact of the media, par-
in

ticularly in the United States. As a young man, all the news that was fit to
print was on the first page of The New York Times; the editorial page had
the biases, the opinions, the subjective viewpoints. He was increasingly con-
cerned that, in a world so dominated by a medium, 80 percent of the popula-
tion now gets most of its news from television, and that this is selected news
which could be biased. There is a potential of having control of the system
held by either unethical persons or those inclined to be manipulators.

My grandmother left me with two pieces of advice that I will give to

remember why there is free cheese in the mousetrap be careful at
you. First, ;

what you snap at. I apologize for having ignored her second piece of advice.
She never heard a poor short talk.
725 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

CRYSTAL M. BAILEY
Children's Librarian
Oak Park Public Library
Oak Park, Illinois

Response

Since I did not have Shane's speech before making this presenta-
tion, I decided to examine articles he had written in the past and hoped that,
with any luck, he might talk about the same thing. Being a very unlucky
person, I now know he did not. Thus, my comments relate to Shane's past
writings.
Shane has stated that knowledge for real educational change already
exists;some of tomorrow's answers can be found in the past. For instance,
new theories, innovative discoveries and changes in education in the 1960s
had already been discussed by educators such as John Dewey and others in
the 1930s. I wondered if the same things could also be happening in libraries.
Are librarians in the 1970s redoing and rediscovering the 1930s? There is
some support for this idea. For example, are not the independent learner
programs and information and referral services innovations of the 1960s
and 1970s essentially a refinement or reformulation of traditional library
services? Aren't we returning to the readers' adviser concept of the 1930s?
Wasn't outreach, the big news of the 1960s, also the big news of the 1930s?
We have learned that learning is based on experience; we learned about
poverty from experience. In education we learned that what children absorb
in the classroom is mediated by their social and cultural backgrounds, yet we

expect all children to meet the same standards of performance in order to

move from grade to grade. We know that children are ready for school at
different ages and different times, yet we require that they all enter at more
or less the same age. In libraries we know that a children's librarian, in order
to do a good job, needs a broad background in learning and developmental

theories; yet library schools have been remiss in incorporating theories of

people such as Piaget and other developmentalists into children's services
courses.One of Shane's ideas that should have a tremendous impact on chil-
dren and adult public library services is his idea that the divisions between
elementary, junior high and senior high schools be dropped and that we
should explore the concepts of a lifelong, seamless, open-access learning con-
 RESPONSE 127

tinuum along which people will progress from early childhood to adult edu-
cation.
Let us look at children's services. Children's departments were set up
to provide books and materials for children to satisfy their informational
needs, to give guidance and to cultivate the enjoyment of reading. I wonder
whether, in light of the future envisioned by Shane and in light of education
itself today, the present structure is satisfying these needs. Has the separate

children's room as we know it become a facilitator or a barrier to the goals

we have stated?
Many children today are ready and able to use more sophisticated ma-
terial than is contained in children's rooms. Increasingly, they need to use
adult material. Yet in many libraries, children still need special permission to
use the adult facilities and even if special permission is not required, some-

times just by physically placing a collection of books elsewhere and labeling

it"adult," children's access is restricted. On the other hand, many adults in
society are not well educated; they do not read well (educational statistics

indicate that this trend will continue) Adults sometimes need the less com-
.

plex material which can be found in children's rooms, but they are too em-
barrassed to enter a place labeled "Children's Room." I am certain that

everyone here knows at least one story about an adult coming into a chil-
dren's room requesting something for a son or daughter, when in reality the
adult wants the material for personal use.
Would I, as a children's librarian, be better able to satisfy the informa-
tional needs of the child if I worked with the library's complete collection?

Would the adult patron be better served with a nonstigmatized access to

children's material? I am not proposing that we eliminate children's services,
but Ido get questions about the validity of the present pattern. I am not
suggesting and do not expect a children's department to be four walls with
people working with a certain clientele to avoid a particular abode. Separate
children's rooms were often established to protect the child and serve his

very special needs. With the current furor over children's rights, do we have
the right to set them apart and give them special treatment when that special
treatment makes it easier to abridge their freedom?
In a recent Supreme Court decision, the Court ruled that students in
school, as well as out of school, are persons under the Constitution. They
possess fundamental rights which the state must respect. Do we respect these
rights when we separate these people or make them special? Children's li-
brarians and the administrators for whom they work have been loathe to
address the question, an assumption on which we base our activities. If we
are to remain effective, we must examine the underlying assumption for our
728 CHANGING TIMES: CHANGING LIBRARIES

services, especially if we more and more educa-

take into consideration that
tors envision an ongoing, self-motivated activ-
a society in which education is

ity. Even today teachers are placing more and more responsibility on the
child for his own learning.
In many ways our refusal to look ahead has already started to hurt us.
The position of children's coordinator has been dissolved in many libraries,
yet nothing appears to have been lost. I believe that this is our own fault. I
have worked in two systems where this has happened. In both cases, the
coordinators were so busy maintaining the status quo and longing for the

"good old days" that they failed to make the necessary shift in orientation
and jurisdiction necessary to make their jobs useful and viable. In one system,
the coordinator spent most of her time selecting the book to be used for

storytelling and making lists of the approved books to purchase. Perhaps this
may have been valid (although I have doubts) when she first began to work,
which was a time when most children's librarians were not degreed. In 1973,
however, when all of this woman's children's librarian staff had master's
degrees, this was an outrageous, unnecessary and wasteful activity for a
person at her level. Her job was eliminated and I do not think the library
is
hurting without her!
What is keeping us from change in the children's area? I believe it is
largely a lack of support from the library administrators and their limited
view of library service to children. Children's departments have traditionally
received only a very small percentage of the total library budget, despite the
fact that most children's departments perform a large portion of the library
service. Children's departments have never been as well staffed as other de-
partments. Change, however, takes time and money. Time is money, and in
order to manage the change, children's service coordinators need time to
think, time to reflect: Why am I doing what I'm doing? They need time to
examine the conceptual basis of the job. I think this is one of the more im-
portant things to consider in order for people to effect change. Time is

needed to do what necessary to keep ourselves headed toward our goal.

is

By their actions, their budget allocations and their staff allocations, too many
administrators deny children's librarians this time. They appear to be saying
to their children's librarians: "You are not important and what you do is
not important." This is not the best way to motivate people.
The lack of research is another factor that has kept us from making real
change. Educators have a rich storehouse of research on which to draw;
the library field does not. A great deal of research in many areas of library
service is needed before we can effect change.
Fear has also kept us from making changes. Recently, when it was an-
nounced that a children's library in Chicago was to be moved to a school
 RESPONSE 129

library, the librarians reacted emotionally rather than intelligently. They

feared that they would suddenly lose their jobs. They could not get beyond
this fear in order to see how they might fit into a new pattern of service.

Let me say in closing that I am still optimistic about our future. I feel
that the librarians coming out of library school today tend to be dedicated,
hard-working people who are already looking toward the future.