Gerald W. Smith Memoir - Brookens Library

Gerald W. Smith 20 2Parkland Cormunity College at Urbana.year.I have seen him there twice tWsQ. Is he teach- the course?A. No, he is a student--on a hobby that he has. McLure, as I say, mademany contributions to educational research. As a researcher he sometlmshad a tendency to be, you how, apart f'rom the general trend of thinking.But between 1958 and 1960, in a joint venture of the Bureau of EducationalResearch at the University with financing and some help from the Office ofthe Superintendent of Public Instruction, he did a study which was publishedin 1960 under the title, ''Vocational and Technical Education - A Plan forIllinois." It was a rather dayling plan. In this document which receivedan enomus amount of response, verbal and written, a proposal was madeto organize the State into ten regions, of 500,000 people approxhatelyeach, outside the Chicago area; and the ten regions should be the adminrlstrativecenters for vocational/technical education, using the largestpopulation center in the region as the home base, and then having scatteredthrough the ten regional bases certain selected vocational programs and theunderlying junior colleges which he took into accownt. His study went sofar as to lay out on a mp the areas and to spot the existingcolleges and to show their role. !his was to be state created and statemanaged and state financed. I might say that he also went so fw as toprovide for a plan to abolish the elected Superintendent of Public Instmctionand to make the Board of Education hire a state superintendent. Thatagency would be, of course, the administration agency of this plan.Q. No wonder his ideas got a lot of attention.A. They did get an enormous amount of attention and because it was sostrikrtng and because it was so far from the pattern of development inIllinois, it received a great deal of adverse reaction and respome. Onthe other hand, many aspects of the study were taken very seriously and Imight indicate that after the Act was passed and I was working with it, Ihad a tendency several times to go back to his study and observe in someway a pattern that actually developed in Illinois which X think was influencedby many of the ideas that were in his original study with regardto the location of colleges, etcetera.trnBut at any rate, that study came out in 1960 and it generated an enoamount of dialog and discussion and newspapem carried it and magazinarticles were written about it. Organizations that were interested, ocourse, set it up on their annual meetings and discussed it. Dr. McLurewas invited on lllany occasions to come and to speak to us and to answerquestions about it and you will observe that, so fm as I am concerned,this was concurrent with the year I arrived in Springfield to begin qr workwith, the Illinois Association of School Adnbistrators, and with the Associationof Junior Colleges. This study was a significant study and whileit was not the pattern that was adopted subsequently, it made atribution both to the level of the dialog and the amount ofwas generated in 1960-1961 and 1962.