september - october - Fort Sill

USE OF SIGNAL CORPS TRAINING MANUALS
appearances are against them. The officer, used entirely to text or reference
books, comes across, let us say, a manual purporting to be the last word on
Message Centres. "Ah," says he, "now I have it. I will immediately find out
what the composition of a regimental message centre is and how it works."
Accordingly he digs through the index, reads a few true-false questions,
wanders around for a while in a maze of blue and yellow pages, and then
hurls the offending manual into the corner with deep curses upon the author
of any such unintelligible gibberish. I don't blame him. My first experience
with these books, had several years ago, was of this nature. They do not
appeal readily to a person accustomed to the ordinary text or reference
book. An organization commander has so much in the way of reading
matter coming to him in the ordinary course of events that he doesn't
hanker to go out looking for more. Nevertheless these manuals are
excellently gotten up and can be used to advantage if they are approached
in the right way.
The Training Manuals were devised by the Signal Corps as a means
to be employed in teaching their specialists; in other words, they are not
so much text-books as they are a method of instruction. The idea
underlying their preparation was that in an emergency, qualified
instructors would be few and far between. This, everyone admits, is a
revolutionary idea in an army which evidently believes that all that it is
necessary to do in order to have an instructor is for competent authority
so to designate an officer. Of course in civilian practice, embryo
instructors (or teachers) go through a complicated course of normal
schools and instructor training, but, as above noted, the army evidently
doesn't believe in this. The Signal Corps was sceptical and so, for each
subject, prepared an "Instructor's Guide" by use of which a green
instructor could keep at least one jump ahead of his class. Every manual
will eventually be divided into a student's manual and an instructor's
guide, the former being the even numbered manual and the latter the
odd. The Instructor's Guide contains exactly the same material as the
student's manual with the addition of certain white pages containing
"Instructions for the Instructor," "Instruction," "Progress," and
"Proficiency" tests. Since it is unlikely that the student's manual will
ever be issued in quantity (and this is not particularly necessary) this
article will discuss only the instructor's guide. In other words, the
difference between the two manuals is in the "get-rich-quick" course in
instructional methods for that particular subject contained in the
instructor's guide.
An analysis of any manual shows it to be composed of several divisions
as follows:
An Introduction.
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