CORPORATIONS: The Teaching Machines

To its 5,000 salesmen across the U.S., Grolier Inc., publisher of America’s oldest encyclopedia, last week handed out an odd-looking new product to sell door to door. A green, windowed, sheet-metal box slightly larger than a typewriter and weighing 7½Ibs., the new product is a teaching machine. Grolier salesmen will sell it along with The Book of Knowledge and the Americana as a help to home learning, but the ultimate stakes are much higher. Grolier President Edward J. McCabe Jr. hopes it will be the first big step toward revolutionizing the $300 million-a-year textbook industry. Says he: “The first educational breakthrough was the film strip. Then came educational TV. The teaching machine may well be next.”

Although some 20 companies are at work designing teaching machines, and several are on the market in limited quantities, the Grolier Min-Max machine represents the first attempt to sell one to the mass market. Priced at $20, the Min-Max is by far the cheapest. After the first door-to-door push, Grolier will offer the machine to industry for technical job training, has 70 ex-school superintendents as salesmen to talk up its merits to school boards. For Grolier, second largest U.S. encyclopedia publisher (after Field Enterprises), the diversification into teaching machines is the next step in an expansion program that in the last decade has boosted sales from $20 million to an estimated $77 million this year.

No Cheating. The teaching machines, in essence, apply to learning what manufacturers applied long ago to industry in developing the mass-production assembly line. Information is broken down into its smallest components and simplest parts. The student learns by putting the information together again in quick, easy stages.

Grolier’s Min-Max is loaded with a “program” of information and questions and answers that instruct the student as he works. The first question appears in a window at the top of the box, and a blank space is provided in another window for the student to write out his answer. When he is finished, he inserts his pencil eraser in a vertical slot, moves the page up until the second question and the answer to the first appear in the window. The paper cannot be moved backward to find the answer first.

No Teachers? The Min-Max was invented by Albuquerque’s Teaching Machines Inc.. a group of psychologists who already have programed, or composed, seven courses, ranging from elementary spelling to college statistics that are ready for sale by Grolier for $5 to $15 each. Programing is an outgrowth of psychological experiments with animals, which can be taught complicated tricks on a one-step-at-a-time basis if frequently rewarded. Harvard Psychologist B. Frederic Skinner, 56, is the leader in adapting animal conditioning techniques to teaching humans; most machine programing follows his basic research experiments on Harvard and Radcliffe students. Programing techniques can also be applied to study courses without machines.

Many educators question whether humans can be taught this way. But there is already ample evidence that in subjects that lend themselves easily to fragment learning, e.g., grammar, spelling, foreign languages, mathematics, automated teaching is far more efficient than the old-fashioned blackboard. New York’s Collegiate School for boys tried teaching machines in math, found that 73 students completed in only two weeks an abstract-algebra course that usually requires two months. The Roanoke public schools used teaching machines on 34 eighth-graders—with no oral teaching and no homework—and in less than one semester, all 34 completed a year’s work in algebra.

No Hesitation. Untrammeled by theory, many a U.S. corporation has already put the efficiency of programed learning to work in job training and company-sponsored adult-education courses. Bell Laboratories has a programed course in basic electricity for its employees. Polaroid offers programed courses to its employees in extracurricular subjects like languages and photography. Eastman Kodak is programing logarithms, economics and industrial relations. All are using programing without machines.

Grolier’s Min-Max will be the first full-scale commercial test of the teaching machine’s appeal, and both industry and education will watch the results closely. Grolier hopes to sell $5,000,000 worth of Min-Max machines and programed courses in the first year, give a boost to Grolier profits ($2,100,000 in 1960’s first half). If Grolier succeeds, the teaching-machine boom will be on.