Education: High Schools, Air-Conditioned

A little green glossary to teach parents what their children are talking about was issued last week by New York City’s school superintendent. For not only in New York but all over the land school children are speaking a strange new language, fazing their elders with terms like wobble pump, advection, burble, troposphere, chandelle, nacelle. A fourth R, preflight training, is now a part of many curricula. Its purpose is to condition school children to take to the air almost as soon as they leave the classroom. Less purposefully, but just as certainly, preflight training will mark an immensurably great divide between the airborne generation of the post-war world and their earth-bound elders.

From the start of the new semester, “air-age education” has become the theme of teaching, from grade school to college. The program has been cooked up in less than six months. When the Civil Aeronautics Administration (backed by the Army, Navy and U.S. Office of Education) broached the idea last spring, there were no air-age textbooks, few air-age teachers. The job of providing both was given to two teams of educators at Columbia and Nebraska Universities, captained by Columbia’s able Professor Ben D. Wood.

Ten thousand willing teachers were rounded up and buckled down to studying aeronautics during the summer. Professor Wood’s teams wrote 18 books, from teachers’ manuals to a 900-page work that covered flying from Icarus to Zero. Macmillan’s made publishing history by turning them out (ordinarily a six-month job) in 38 days. The books were distributed to schools at record low prices. At the school discount, the 900-page Science of Pre-Flight Aeronautics cost 99¢.

The books (called the Air-Age Education Series) add an aeronautical third dimension to mathematics, physics, biology, history, geography, economics, politics, even literature. History lessons now plug a new crop of aero-heroes (from Leonardo da Vinci to the Wright Brothers). Biology lessons describe what happens to a pilot when he blacks out. Social science lessons picture a post-war world of “aerial freight trains,” and decentralized living. Anthologies of the rich, adventurous literature of flying enliven English lessons.

To the nation’s youngsters, air-age education was the best news they had heard in many a day. By last week the Office of Education figured that fully half of U.S. high schools were already teaching aeronautics. For small, remote schools that lacked teachers and texts, the University of Wisconsin started a correspondence course. Teachers, many of whom knew less about aviation than their pupils, hastened to bone up to keep one jump ahead. Macmillan’s quickly sold out its first printing of the books (40,000), rushed a second. In Manhattan scores of students, too eager to wait until their schools supplied the books, descended on bookstores to buy their own.

Mightily pleased was bald, businesslike Robert H. Hinckley, Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Air, who had kindled this fire. Cried Hinckley: “History has faced us with the plain alternative: Fly—or die! The entire nation must become air-conditioned. . . . We shall be thoroughly air-conditioned when we are not startled by the proposal that school children visit the Arctic by transport plane to study Eskimos in their native habitat.”