How Do the Teachers Learn?

In less than two years the Ford Foundation has given $10 million to U.S. schools and colleges--mostly in fellowships and research grants. Last week its directors settled on a more revolutionary project--a system of teaching internships, to replace the old-style teachers' college. If it works, the Ford plan may change U.S. teacher training as much as the hospital internship program transformed medical education a generation ago.

Co-authors of the plan are the Ford Foundation's Dr. Alvin C. Eurich, former president of the State University of New York, and Rutgers President Lewis Webster Jones, until last month head of the University of Arkansas. Their program will substitute a four-year general college course for the ragbag collection of teachers' college curricula now in use. Students who plan to teach will learn their pedagogy after graduation, in one year of on-the-job study, at selected teachers' training centers. Only after their year of paid internship--working with pupils under the direction of "master teachers"--will they get teaching certificates.

Explains Dr. Jones: "A great many educators have felt for a long time that emphasis on teaching techniques has gotten out of hand in this country. Undergraduates who plan to enter the teaching profession have been spending an increasing amount of their time on the sort of subjects that are facetiously referred to as 'blackboard engineering.' . . . In some cases they spent more time studying teaching methods than they did studying the subject they would be called upon to teach."

Next September, Arkansas' two state teachers' colleges, aided by Ford money, plan to start their conversion to four-year general college courses. Private colleges in the state, if they fall in with the plan, will get the same help. The changeover will take a good ten years to complete, and it will be at least 1962 before the last traces of blackboard engineering are erased from Arkansas' school system.

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