Army & Navy as Educator

"Join the Army or Navy and get a college education." Such was the gist of a solemn announcement by the American Council on Education last week. The A.C.E. and the armed forces had cooked up a scheme whereby U.S. colleges will give soldiers and sailors credits toward college degrees, for education they get in service.

One soldier of every two today attends an Army or Navy school (for technicians, specialists, officer candidates, etc.). Thousands more take correspondence courses on their own account. Nothing like it was seen in World War I.

Purpose of the American Council's plan is to enable soldiers & sailors to cash in their wartime learning after the war. To make sure that schools and colleges do not hand out credits indiscriminately for military service alone (as they did after World War I), the Council commissioned the University of Chicago to design tests.

Their object: to find out not only what soldiers & sailors learned in classes but how much their military experience matured them.

Fastest-growing branch of the Army-Navy educational system is its correspondence courses -- now offered by 77 U.S. colleges. Army & Navy pay half the cost, students the other half. But the biggest job is done by Army's own correspondence school, the Army Institute, with headquarters at the University of Wisconsin. Headed by Lieut. Colonel Francis T. Spaulding, Army Educational chief (borrowed from his job as dean of Harvard's School of Education), the Army Institute ships its courses not only to training camps but to troops on atolls in the Pacific and in the jungles of Africa. The Army expects that enrollment in these courses will soon top 100,000. So far the most popular courses are mathematics, bookkeeping, shorthand, trades.

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