leading scientists and engineers when we interview young people who apply for positions as designers and builders of nuclear reactors or as officers and men to operate our nuclear ships. I find the percentage so qualified to be deplorably small. Those selected we must send to special schools set up and run by our own naval reactors group. These schools do not teach reactor technology alone; they also have to teach many basic subjects which abroad have already been taught in the regular schools. My "school system" of six schools enrolls about 2,500 students at different levels from high school to graduate university. So I can claim some personal experience with educating young Americans.

Mr. CANNON. If I may be frank with you, Admiral Rickover.

Isn't nuclear propulsion a narrowly specialized field? Can you judge American education solely by the educational qualifications of persons who want to work in this field?

Admiral RICKOVER. How can I, who am engaged in a specialtynuclear propulsion-qualify as a critic of education? It so happens that this specialty has in it all the elements that go into modern technology. When you find out what it takes to accomplish an engineering project for developing atomic energy you know what it takes to do almost any other new development job. The educational qualifications of the people who do the technical work and of those who direct it as administrators are roughly the same. In fact, our nuclear project is a pretty good touchstone of the effectiveness of our schools. It calls for flexibility and toughness of mind, for understanding the basic principles in physics, chemistry, and all types of engineering. Also for what I'd like to call an impersonal "scientific" attitude toward the work that must be done. This means, first of all, a readiness to go back to fundamental principles, for it is these that must be applied in a novel way to develop a new item such as a nuclear reactor. It requires readiness to shed accustomed routines-nothing new can be created by routine methods. It means on the part of nontechnical administrators, who are set above the technical people doing the actual development work, that they must forget their organizational "status" when it comes to dealing with technical problems. Because here they are inferior in knowledge to the experts who are organizationally their subordinates. It isn't easy for people whose jobs give them power, not to use this power but to respect the imperatives of science and engineering and to bow to the judgment of technical subordinates in all technical matters.

BUREAUCRACY, CONFORMITY, AND AMERICAN EDUCATIONAL

PHILOSOPHY

Unlike basic scientific research, engineering projects are not selfcontained group efforts. By choosing and training the technical people in my organization with utmost care, I have been able to assemble and train an engineering group with high competence in reactor technology. But the country does not obtain full benefit of their broad and long experience, of their spirit of cooperative endeavor and their ability to produce nuclear ships that are ready to go to war immediately after their sea trials. Much of their time is frittered away "educating" a constantly changing stream of administrators and doing the needless paperwork these people order. Once, when a par

ticularly useless report was requested, one that would have tied up a considerable number of engineers for weeks, I demanded to know how thick the report should be, 9 inches, 13 inches, or 17 inches. The 9-inch thick report would require 4 weeks full-time work, the others correspondingly more. As you know, many people judge the value of a report by its thickness. It so happened that right at the time we were having many technical difficulties and not one engineer was available to take care of these-they were all busily writing useless reports.

It is too bad that the "personality cult" and the desire to "manipulate" people rather than to produce useful practical products so permeates our powerful administrators that, instead of helping new projects, they often hinder them. I have never had any technical help from nontechnical administrators. Their human deficiencies are, I believe, a result of the educational philosophy that has permeated the American public school system since Dewey and his followers diverted our schools from traditional objectives and methods into the dead end of life, adjustment, permissiveness, and the use of the schools as social levelers instead of developers of our children's intellectual powers.

The schoolmen could not have thought up a more inappropriate concept of education for this day and age. They could not have dreamed up a worse way to educate young Americans for the tough days ahead. Particularly bad is the excessive emphasis laid in our schools on making oneself popular by conforming to the ways of the "peer" group, on assiduously cultivating an "image" of oneself that will enhance one's status, on personalizing human contacts even when these involve accomplishing tasks which must depend on knowledge and intellectual competence. A generation has grown up that puts "getting along" above competence on the job and above the intellectual courage of sticking by one's considered judgment; especially when it means objecting to orders by superiors whose own judgment be ill considered since they lack the necessary technical knowledge. There is no surer way to become unpopular than to set oneself against a technically incompetent superior bent on using the power of his position to enforce his will. And though one may do this from the most sincere motives, he will be castigated by everyone as a "controversial nonconformer," and today in this country there is no worse term of opprobrium.

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Here is the sort of thing I mean: One day one of my superiors asked that I reduce the amount of radiation shielding in our nuclear ships. He said I was using civilian radiation safety standards but that in military units, personnel casualties of 20 to 30 percent were sometimes accepted. I told him I was sorry I could not do what he asked. I couldn't ignore the fact that where radiation is involved we are dealing not just with the health of the men aboard one ship, but with the genetic future of mankind. The official replied that no one knew much about evolution anyway, and if we raised radiation exposures we might find that the resultant mutations were helpful rather than harmful and that mankind might "learn to live with radiation." You can see what utter nonsense this was. Yet this man had authority. Had I not been obstreperous, had I been a good "organization man," I would have gone along and reduced the shielding and gained favor with him at the expense of some unlucky Navy men and their descendants.

I mention this merely to illustrate how important it is today that we educate our youth to respect the imperatives of science, and to insist on their superiors likewise respecting these imperatives-even at the risk of losing one's job.

I have a legitimate concern with American education simply because I am a citizen of this country and would be derelict in my duties if I did not express my worries over what will happen to our badly educated young people in a world where the United States finds iteself increasingly in competition with other nations-politically, militarily, scientifically, economically, culturally; in fact, in every area of human activity. Besides this, I have a personal concern with American education because my own engineering projects are representative of many that simply must be carried through if our Nation is to remain in top position. These projects are often being harassed and delayed by human deficiencies which a good school system could have done much to prevent.

CURRENT EVIDENCE OF THE NATION'S EDUCATIONAL INADEQUACIES

Naturally, I am aware that many types of human competencies are needed in a complex society. But among these ability to translate new scientific discoveries into useful products is surely one that is of crucial importance at the present time. I have often spoken of the danger in our lengthening leadtimes, especially since leadtime in the Soviet Union has been contracting and in some important items now seems to be shorter than ours. Short leadtimes are a result of skill in planning and carrying through complex new development projects; that is, in recognizing what is needed in personnel, funds, and equipment and providing them in adequate quality and quantity. Essentially, it is a skill that can be deliberately cultivated through proper education, just as the needed personnel can be produced by proper education. Our lengthening leadtimes are therefore an indicator that something is radically wrong in our school system. Whatever other tasks it may have to accomplish, surely a public school system in a country such as ours must develop in youth the kind of intellectual attitudes and abilities that are an absolute necessity if we are to progress technologically, and at a pace at least as rapid as that of competing nations.

That our schools fail in this task has worried me for a long time. As you know, knowledge now doubles every 10 to 15 years; we lack the educated manpower to make full use of the great opportunities this growth of knowledge offers. Also, since we no longer live in geographic isolation from world affairs we suffer in our contacts abroad from a lack of educated manpower to make our national goals effective. We are plagued with serious deficiencies in virtually every class of occupation that makes demands upon a person's general and specialized education, whether it is at the level of the "learned" professional, the semiprofessional, the skilled craftsman, or the technician. Despite our enormous and costly educational establishment, this country has more functional illiterates than most other industrially advanced nations. We have more people who do not possess minimum knowledge of the elements of language, mathematics, history, and geography that are considered part of elementary education in advanced European countries and which every normal person there appears to

absorb at school. Recently, the Army published the fact that 25 percent of draftees were unqualified to be modern soldiers-25 percent of a cross section of young America! In most cases the deficiencies were mental. In Switzerland, where every male does military service, the rejection rate is about 7 percent. Swiss standards for draftees are certainly no more lenient than U.S. Army standards. I refuse to accept this appalling difference between rejection rates of 7 percent and 25 percent as reflecting on the intelligence and educability of American youth. I blame American schools for this.

THE NEED TO IMPROVE AND EXTEND EDUCATION OF SKILLED WORKERS AND TECHNICIANS

For a modern industrial nation, it seems to me evident we have too few skilled workers. This shows up glaringly in advanced technologies as nuclear power, missiles, satellites, for here we need precision hardware that cannot be produced by our usual mass production techniques, but requires craftsmanship. We put less effort into systematic education of adequate numbers of skilled workers and technicians than either Europe or Russia. Our high school vocational courses are of little practical use and are positively dangerous when they replace courses in basic education. The modern craftsmanlike the professional person-needs a good general education as well as specialized training in his particular craft. We make a mistake in trying to provide both in a "general" school such as our high school. A high school makes the best contribution to the educational needs of future skilled craftsmen when it gives them a first-rate basic education. To teach the innumerable craft skills needed in a modern industrial nation is beyond its capacity. High school vocational_courses are bound to lag behind industry's rapidly changing needs. I suggest we examine the diverse postschool apprenticeship and technical school courses-full and part time-by means of which Europe produces proportionally far more skilled workers than do we.

Russia has a tremendous training program for technicians. England's work force is 50 percent skilled, 12 percent semiskilled. Switzerland produces virtually no unskilled labor and must import it from abroad-currently 25 percent of her workers are foreigners. In most European countries there is a shortage of unskilled workers; here the shortage is among the skilled. A little over a decade ago American educational officialdom, under the sponsorship of the U.S. Office of Education, declared in the so-called Prosser resolution, that our schools could not educate more than 20 percent of their pupils for skilled labor, and another 20 percent for what we call "college preparatory goals." The remaining 60 percent were to be fobbed off with unintellectual life-adjustment training.

Automation was certainly in the air even then. It is incomprehensible that the schoolmen did not foresee what is now so tragically evident to all of us: that workers lacking a good basic education are badly handicapped in learning a new skill when their jobs become obsolete because of automation. The schools, I feel, must share part of the blame that, even while there is a shortage of skilled workers and technicians, we have a surplus of poorly educated unskilled labor for whom it is becoming increasingly difficult to find jobs. Children who get substandard education will cost State and Federal Govern

ments large sums of money in later years, both through lost taxes and through increased welfare payments.

SHORTAGES IN PROFESSIONAL FIELDS

Our shortage is even greater in the category of "professionals." I need not elaborate on our lack of genuinely qualified scientists and engineers; you are only too well aware of this. Despite efforts to encourage more young people to enter engineering, the Nation's deficit in this field grows steadily. Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare Ribicoff, reported a few months ago that we graduate each year about 45,000 engineers but need 72,000; he warned that the balance of brainpower may tip dangerously against us if the Nation does not soon awake to the importance of education to the freedom of the Western World. Russia is graduating 120,000 engineers annually. We have similar shortages in medicine. Currently we graduate about 7,400 physicians. This is just three quarters of our minimum requirement. To fill our doctor gap we import physicians, most of them from Far and Middle Eastern countries. About 8,000 of these are now serving in our hospitals. If these foreign doctors remain here, they will constitute a loss to the countries that paid for their training, a loss these countries can ill afford. This is a shameful situation. It doesn't make sense for us to give billions of dollars to underdeveloped countries and then to take their few trained professionals away from them. This is reverse foreign-aid with a vengeance. It defeats the basic intent behind the program. We are, I believe, the only Western nation that cannot manage to produce enough doctors for its needs. We have a similar shortage in nurses. I read in the papers that we now lure them from Canada. The "professionals" shortage extends into many other spheres. One of the worst deficits, and to my mind the most important, is in teachers.

OUR PHILOSOPHY OF "IDENTICAL EDUCATION" AND OUR TRAINED

MANPOWER SHORTAGES

Now all these shortages are in large part a result of our having a public school system with a built-in bias against bright youngsters. We have committed ourselves to an educational philosophy of identical education for all. To provide for the needs of the talented, our educationists constantly tell us, would be "elite" education. This is a loaded word that seeks to engage our emotions and prevent straight thinking. "Elite" education, as I see it, would be education where good schooling can be had only at high cost, thus barring from it the majority of children whose parents could not pay school fees. In the past, education like other amenities of life was a private expense. Children of the rich not only got better education, but also nicer homes, more expensive clothes, better medical care, and all sorts of other things. We have removed education, up to the end of high school, from this list. Most countries abroad have gone beyond us by doing this also for bright students preparing for the professions. When schooling is tuition free, it automatically ceases to be "elite" education. What you have when you make realistic provision for differing scholastic aptitudes and needs of children is acceleration for those who can learn fast. These are the children who are intelligent