Federal Education: You're in the Classroom Now

At least in theory, it is now possible for a semi-illiterate to enter the U.S. Army and come out a college graduate, with the Pentagon paying 75% of the tab. To apply its fabulous technology, the U.S. military has become an extraordinary teacher of everything from astronautics to electronics to nucleonics to teaching itself. Now the Defense Department even has a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Education. He is Edward L. Katzenbach Jr., a driving man of 44 who runs a $350 million-a-year empire that spurs learning throughout the armed forces, although it does not control such elite professional schools as West Point and the Naval War College.

The U.S. serviceman now spends 50% to 80% of his time in schools, says a report issued last week by Columbia University's Teachers College. The military has 300,000 students in schools all over the world, from Arctic huts to the National War College. In the U.S. alone are 300 military schools teaching 4,000 courses, from the three-R level to the Ph.D. Even the raw recruit now spends a third of his time in a classroom; the general gets the equivalent of two or three years of graduate study. To keep everyone learning off-duty as well, 33 correspondence schools provide 2,500 mail-order courses to 1,000,000 servicemen and servicewomen around the globe.

Welter of Waste. Military learning is also balm for the unemployment problem: at least 60% of what the services teach is directly applicable to civilian jobs. Hundreds of thousands of servicemen go back to become everything from auto mechanic to bacteriologist to weatherman. Almost 100,000 men now in the services have been raised to the equivalent of a high school education since they entered—a figure equal to about a tenth of the nation's annual school dropout rate.

Until recently, military education was a welter of waste, duplication and congressional bewilderment. In 1961, Katzenbach was brought in to organize military learning, coordinate it with civilian education. Katzenbach, whose younger brother Nicholas is U.S. Deputy Attorney General, had the right pedigree for both sides. He earned his Legion of Merit as a Marine officer at Eniwetok, his Ph.D. at Princeton. He taught history at Columbia, directed defense studies at Harvard and academic development at Brandeis.

Katzenbach's toughest problem is the U.S.'s ninth biggest school system—the 284 overseas schools serving 161,040 children of military men abroad. He hears bitter complaints from the schools' 7,000 civilian teachers, whose pay has risen only $100 a year since 1960. But he has three applicants for every vacancy, and is striving hard to standardize everything from grading to accounting.