Lessons from Military-Sponsored College Training

Abstract

A LTHOUGH the Army Specialized Training Program was organized to co-ordinate all professional training for the Army, exemption was specifically given a little-publicized pre-professional program sponsored by the Army Air Forces. There were several reasons: the program seemed to be destined to terminate automatically upon the graduation of current classes; its seventy-five hundred students were, as a general once observed, small potatoes to an Army concerned with millions; and, not least important, its organization and management were so popular with the twenty-five participating colleges and universities that they wished to see no change. This was the Pre-meteorological Training Program of thp Army Air Forces, which graduated its last class in May, I944. College and university authorities connected with the program are now beginning to appraise their experiences. Some of their findings are of significance both for wartime training and peacetime education. A professor in one of the best-known New England colleges recently wrote, regard my year's participation in this program as the most significant experience I have had in seventeen years of teaching. To understand this appraisal of experience, a general picture of the training program is necessary. The Army Air Forces began pre-meteorological training to provide a reserve of men qualified for advanced study as meteorologists or weather officers, then greatly needed by the Air Forces. The plan differed from most of the military-sponsored programs in four important respects. First, its students were not arbitrarily assigned,