Is the “teaching machine” an ugly ogre? Does it promise new blessing or new burden for the Church’s task in the world?
Whichever your answer, the arrival of the teaching machine for auto-instruction carries in its wake a widespread wash of devices and programming. Already 45 different kinds of commercial teaching machines are available. At least 104 companies are presently in various stages of producing programs or machines or both. Several publishing houses are working with manufacturers in producing efforts. Encyclopaedia Britannica Films reports programming sales amounting to $190,000 during the last three and one half months of 1961. Predicted sales are at least $3 million this year, $5 million in 1963, $6.5 million in 1964. This, for a movement initiated in 1958.
Use of the new learning technique in education show’s a corresponding gain. According to the National Education Association, procedures for 296 automated courses were prepared for general use last year, with 334 more scheduled this year. Programmed courses in mathematics, science, electronics and engineering, foreign languages and social studies are appearing, along with others. Even so, a shortage exists in materials and personnel for programming.
Even churches with huge education plants, or denominations urging effective use of audio-visual aids will not compete with the spiraling use of auto-instruction devices in industry. What significance have these commercial programs for church-related classes? The answer to that question lies in the nature of the device itself. What is it? Why is it effective? What are its possibilities and limitations for Christian education?
Auto-instruction devices have two aspects—programming and machines. In programming a goal is set and procedures planned to direct the learner toward that goal. The machines make possible the procedure. They are used generally to give information to the pupil and to record his response to testing.
Technologically, the machines differ. On some the pupil marks his answers on a card by punching a key. Or a series of pupil machines may be controlled by a teacher’s console on which lights appear to show pupil responses. A filmstrip projector shows the learning content, the pupil uses an attached typewriter keyboard for test answering: when he answers correctly the filmstrip moves ahead. Machines use a variety of accessories: multiple choice sheets with answers masked; paper chemically treated to change color when written upon, for cheating control; pencils; punches; tabs; replaceable paper rolls; discs with separate answer wheels; flashing lights; card selection; films and records; magnetic tape; and microfilm.
An especially prepared textbook presents the method in simplest form. The text upon casual examination appears to be in confusion, but programming gives the key. As Johnny and Tom use it, they both read page one. Then each selects an answer from a list of alternative questions given to test their understanding. A page number follows each question. This shows the page to read next. John’s answer is wrong. The page number listed for his next reading will clarify the point missed. Tom’s correct answer will direct him to a new topic. When answers differ, subsequent pages differ. This programming continues throughout the book.
Program and machine are combination units. Machine has value in its relation to programming, but only as a technical aid. An effective teaching device, according to a report for the National Education Association by James D. Finn and Donald G. Perrin, should meet a criterion of not less than five of the seven desiderata: 1. used for individual instruction; 2. contains and presents program content in steps; 3. provides means whereby the student may respond to the program; 4. provides the student with immediate information concerning his response; 5. presents the frames of the program individually; 6. presents the program in a pre-determined sequence; 7. is cheatproof (Occasional Paper No. 3, Teaching Machines and Programmed Learning, 1962, p. 18). Eight supplementary criteria are also listed as being optional.
The teaching device has an effective approach because it is based upon sound educational method. It permits the learner to proceed at his own pace; subject matter is presented by short, simple, graphic ideas. The student knows when his answer is right; mistakes are located and remedied at once; theory-to-practice sequence is apparent; a modified law of effect is present; complex learning is focused upon a specific problem; the Socratic tried-and-true method of testing is utilized.
Far from being eliminated, the effective teacher can use the machine to reinforce learning. The teacher sometimes does the programming.
Innovation in education arises to meet cultural need. A perennial problem in all education, whether Christian or secular, lies in the difficulty of presenting new concepts to groups with widely disparate backgrounds and abilities. In a homogeneous culture this difficulty is lessened: in a heterogeneous culture—as in an American city—it is increased. Complexity of culture results in increased pupil differences. Socrates with his ambulatory school in Athens was better able to discern the ideas of his students and to relate them to his teaching, than can a teacher in an ethically and socially mixed class in Harlem. In many ways, the chasm which Socrates bridged was smaller than the pupil-teacher chasm which the modern Christian teacher faces with a group of teenagers. We are cautioned that the present cultural trend toward conformity tends to mask rather than to reveal such differences. The machine, focusing upon a specific, detailed area of learning can vividly reveal the skills mastered, or show where the pupil is confused and groping. Only as his basic learning has reached a desired level, does he proceed to new learning—at his own pace, fast or slow.
Where are the possibilities in all this for Christian education? In any church, large or small, the difficulties will inevitably be more complex than those confronting the teacher in the secular school. Teaching time is more limited; the leader is more often handicapped by inadequate training; pupil contacts are usually more circumscribed. Confronted with this challenge, the wise teacher will be eager to seize every opportunity for needed, available help.
To be sure, the difficulties in the new method for the church are readily apparent. With the church confronting a crucial need for missions, and plant overhead rising like a rocket, is the additional expense required for more effective teaching aids justifiable? With the shortage of trained leaders can personnel be located for the necessary programming? If pupils are not trained by the use of the devices in the public schools, can the church spare the time required to train them for such use? While the machines will increase learning values for the individual, will they seriously impair group life? Will not their use arouse criticism among the inadequately informed members of the church?
Some answers to these questions must be found in the local setting, others will be determind by experimentation. The decision to proceed in this area lies with the producer of church school curricula, as well as with leaders in the local church. Some have already embarked upon a production course. For cost reasons, textbooks and visual aids in Christian education, rather than the more elaborate hardware, will probably center the stage.
The innovation of the teaching device is merely an extension of the program approach to curriculum which is widely established both in secular and Christian education. Activity sheets or other techniques for revealing the learner’s development in knowledge, attitudes and skills have long been employed in many church schools. Curricula are planned to meet pupil needs. Since programming is done by the leader who has a theory of subject matter, a theory of the nature of learning, of programming, and of educational objectives, basic evaluation must be concerned with the programming, rather than merely with the use of the machine as the device which exists to manipulate the program.
In significant areas, the new approach shows strong promise of worthwhile results. The following examples illustrate: by helping the church education committee toward a growing understanding of its responsibilities and opportunities, the tone of the entire church education program can be sharpened; teaching aids for free-time individual use by teachers and officers can prove invaluable for developing a strong corps of leaders; accurate testing-correction procedures for biblical knowledge at every age-level can help to counteract the lamentable ignorance of high school and college youth. Within the broader church program, where skills are as important a part of training as they are in industry, the approach might well revolutionize certain forms of education. For example, a program geared to train in soul-winning method could be of permanent value for use by many age groups. Some course content, as Christian apologetics, also appears to be happily adapted to such an approach.
Undoubtedly the church, the Christian school—elementary, high school, and college—will find increasing opportunities for effectively using the teaching machines.
While this innovation may play a significant role in Christian education, the spotlight must always focus upon human leadership. Christian education uses a unique book to bring knowledge of a personal God. The Christian life is concerned with a new relationship to God, through Jesus Christ, his Son. This relationship brings a new life in Christ, knowledge and glad obedience to the Lord of Glory. Training for it is basically person-centered.
Jesus trained twelve men by living with them, walking with them, knowing them. He lived before them and they learned of him. The most effective Christian teaching is yet that of a Christian life lived before the pupil. It is the Holy Spirit of God who kindles the truth imprinted upon heart and mind, that the will of God may be done. The God-given methods which he uses make person-related education central. No machine can produce the faith, grace, prayer and love by which the Christian teacher follows the Spirit’s guidance in winning the pupil to his Lord. Let no Christian teacher say, “I am to be replaced by a machine.” No machine can reproduce the truth taught and caught from the Spirit-filled life of Christian pastor, parent teacher or layman. Only in contact with the life of the individual Christian appears that consummation of Christian teaching which makes most effective an understanding of the Word of God.
Yet in the learning situation where training for out-comes in specific Christian knowledge and attitudes is taking place, the teaching machine may give invaluable aid. Why should not the church seize upon this contribution from that very industrialization which makes its task so difficult?
The number of companies in the field and results to date strongly suggest that mechanical helps will prove of increasing importance in the field of religious instruction. What Dale Wolf of the American Association for the Advancement of Science has called “the first major technological innovation in education since the development of printing (Science, February 16, 1962, p. 503)—may well be the first, hesitant, exploratory step in a twentieth century explosion in teaching techniques to be used by the church to the glory of God.
Christian University Not A Lost Cause
Scarcely a week passes but that someone from somewhere posts us a note in behalf of a Christian university, and urges American evangelicals of all denominations to move along with the project. Recently, moreover, a professor at one of the largest Eastern universities confided: “Our means are modest, but my wife and I have renegotiated our will to leave them and my library to the Christian university if it is operating at the time the will becomes effective. CHRISTIANITY TODAY must not allow the vision of such a university to die.” Interest in a Christian university seems to be widening; believers will do well to give it a permanent place and high priority in their prayers.
Pleasure? Americans Can’T Take It Except With The Pain Of Guilt
Do Americans live for pleasure? No, says Walter Kerr in his fascinating book The Decline of Pleasure. We are not a joyous, singing people; we have lost the capacity for enjoyment. When we do something just for fun, contemplate beauty for the sheer joy of it, we are nagged by a sense of wrong-doing. We take our pleasures with pain, the pain of guilt. We can no longer morally afford a vacant evening, a true vacation.
The cause of our inability to take pleasure? Americans are driven by the morality of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian ethic which rules with immodest absoluteness that such conduct alone is moral as produces an after-the-event residue of concrete benefit. Conduct which is disinterested in gain and utility is immoral. This ethic is making us work-mad, not pleasure-mad. As a result, we are edgy, restless, guilty. By this ethic John Stuart Mill was reared; it kept his youth unsullied by pleasure, sent him at 3 to mathematics, at 13 to Aristotle, and at 21 to a breakdown. Let Americans take thought!
Kerr’s analysis is perceptive but superficial. On a deeper level his secularized version of our malaise would read: Americans are guilty before God, work like mad to be justified by works rather than faith, know not the non-utilitarian agape of God and, blind to God’s sabbath, know not wherein to take their rest. The answer to our loss of pleasure is that man was created to know God and enjoy him forever.
Hollywood Seduces A Teen-Age Idol … And The Kids Love It
Once upon a time, Pat Boone refreshed many hearts because of his strong stand for decency. He wrote three books for teen-agers in which he espoused high Christian ideals. He pursued church activities faithfully and gained the reputation of a model husband. In his first movie, “April Love,” Boone refused to do more than hold the hand of the heroine.
With this in mind, one views his latest film, “State Fair,” with indignation and then with profound sorrow. Here is a sordid Hollywood product, and Boone is the leading participant.
There is a sideshow girl who dances with seductive abandon, capturing Boone in the process. With Boone stripped to the waist, the pair engage in as torrid and violent love-making as is possible to depict on a screen. Suggestive dialogue is interspersed throughout. The payoff is when Boone comes home drunk.
Some of the picture is meant to be funny, but it is hard to laugh. Instead, we weep for Boone because Hollywood has seduced him. There is also heartbreak in that the film was shown in Washington during the height of the high-school tourist season, and the theater was packed with shrieking teen-agers. They yelled the loudest when Boone came home drunk.
A fallen idol and revelling worshippers. It is to weep.
Red China’S Great Leap Forward Falters In Its Quest For Security
The recent acknowledgment by Red China that the failure of its Great Leap Forward program has plunged the Chinese government into a serious economic crisis should appear to many as a lucid refutation of its belief in the inevitable character of its economic progress. It should be evident that there is nothing sacrosanct about economic determinism, nothing divine about the political theories of Marx or Engels. Rather, like all human efforts to build security without God, the activities of these men falter on the realities of droughts, famine and the hundreds of other ills which men face daily.
The student of the Word of God does not need such instances to teach him that all human attempts to find security in this life are fordoomed to failure. “Without me,” says Christ, “ye can do nothing.” And again, “Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.” Man’s security does not rest in economic determinism, nor even in the blessings of a free and open economy. It rests solely on the free activity of God’s Word in the hearts of men. And this is personal. It is beyond the power of man to effect. And it is eternal.
