Coming of Age Via ETV

313 Anolani St.

Honolulu, Hawaii

The scene was not unlike those repeated thousands of times in the last century in colonial islands around the South Pacific:

The Great White Governor was arriving for a ceremonial visit and the men of the small out-islands were waiting in a sturdy longboat to bear him in through the surf past the dangerous coral reef. In this particular island of Tau in the Manua Group of American Samoa it was certainly that way when anthropologist Margaret Mead was there in the 1920s doing research for her book, Coming of Age in Samoa.

Now, to be sure, there were some differences:

For one, the governor, his entourage of chiefs, officials, and guests arrived at Tau on a high-speed launch, albeit after a pounding five-hour trip from Pago Pago on the main island of Tutuila that had made virtually everyone a retching wreck from seasickness.

For another, the purpose of the visit was to dedicate a high school where the major medium of instruction is television beamed from the central studio in Tutuila 80 miles away. It is the first high school in the isolated Manua Group with its three small islands and 2,500 American Samoans.

The day was set aside for ceremony, first the dedication of the school (already in use for over a year), then a regular cap-and-gown commencement, entertainment, and a feast. Governor Owen Aspinall made two speeches and took some good-natured kidding in the dancing and singing skits about his small size, tender white feet, and the idea that he was married to a Samoan should make him went to do more for Manua.

But the real star of the day was ETV and what it may or may not mean for American Samoa and perhaps some other Pacific Islands.

Gov. Aspinall and wife greet Tau ETV High School graduates

Educational television was the most dramatic and controversial of the innovations brought in by former Governor Rex Lee after the U.S. made its early-1960 decision to make amends for past neglect of its tiny seven-island territory-almost 2300 miles south by east of Hawaii.

ETV has been in operation since October of 1964 and it is easy to get all sorts of opinions. Most of them are favorable, even enthusiastic, such as that of Gabriel Richmond, the lean and dedicated principle who has spent two years building and operating the school on Tau. Now preparing to return to California, he looked around at the mixture of new buildings and smiling barefoot Samoans:

“It’s been rough going. There are things to be worked out still,” he said. “But I am sold on the basic idea. TV allows us to provide the same educational program here on a little island some 70 miles away as it does in Pago Pago.” There was even evidence of a sort in the fact a couple of the regular ETV teachers from Pago along for the trip were recognized and treated as TV “stars” by the Manua children.

But ETV in Samoa does not lack for critics. They range from sour-grape foreigners to outmoded educators to informed and seriously concerned people who have worked or still do work in the system. One teacher on Tau gave me a short lecture:

“Sure I have lots of reservations about ETV: It can’t be geared for the under-average student in any way. You have to shoot for the mean among thousands. Everybody knows parts of the secondary program have been a fiasco. There is not much warmth and the effect varies. It’s good, for example, in science and the social sciences and poor for math and reading.”

Professor Harry J. Skornia, a TV education expert from the University of Illinois, wrote after a study-tour to Samoa last year:

“As one of the ‘parents’ of the project (I was just leaving the presidency of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters when we were beginning to organize it) I feel particularly free to criticize it, for this constitutes in part self-criticism.

“There is no question that, as a project demonstrating the success of TV as the core of the educational system of the area, or culture, this one is a great success.

“But I have some concerns. It was not until I had watched children, hour after hour, viewing program after program, end-to-end, that I began to have serious questions. Are we not by the present approach re-enforcing the same cultural conformity that village and chief-based traditions already breed? Do we not now need desperately to introduce into this project teaching machines and other media and tools designed for individualwork, by the student alone, by himself?

“Seeing students sitting side by side in classrooms with hands folded, hour after hour, was something of a shock to me, though I should have known that this kind of concentration (and it is most successful as concentration) and passivity would result. The brief few moments when students are asked (still in group) to discuss or question do not provide adequate individual development and attention…

“As a people the Samoans need to find more things they are good at — and individual analysis and development is essential for that…

“I recommend that…a study be made, leading to efforts to introduce into the project and educational system individualized media and procedures to reduce present tendencies towards lock-step methods, group thinking, and general re-enforcement of de-individualizing conformity…”

I saw the year-old Skornia report after leaving Samoa, and was therefore unable to discuss it. But some of the points of criticism were still reflected in some of the comments on the ETV program.

Governor Aspinall, while not a critic, is not known as an enthusiastic supporter of ETV. “You might say Aspinall is not a strong program man,” said one education official, dryly. He added: “Every politician needs his horse to ride and ETV was one of Governor Lee’s. Aspinall is looking for his own.”

Aspinall himself described his view as “not too disappointed… There has been good progress in some ways, even though we have had to forego things like vocational education which I considered a drastic mistake.”

Returns Not In

The essential point, however, is that the returns are far from in for any real judgment of the impact of ETV in American Samoa. In the interim one can only look at the alternatives and think about the scattered results so far.

Involved are both basic and some immediate questions:

For some there is, of course, the basic question of whether you really benefit Pacific peoples on islands with limited resources by giving them a quality education. Do you build false hopes that cannot be fulfilled? Some would argue it is much more humane to give the masses little besides the rudiments of literacy, if that, while concentrating on an “elite” of royal and academically exceptional students who will be future leaders.

“The British have done that in their colonies for years. So did the New Zealanders in Western Samoa,” said one American official. “The result was obviously better than our do-nothing policy in American Samoa. But the ‘elite’ system wouldn’t work for us, and we are obviously in a big new game now.”

What he was saying is that the U.S. in American Samoa (and presumably in the Trust Territory and other colonies) is stuck with the concept that every child deserves to be educated to the maximum of his potential. You do this with the feeling that even if many people are “over educated” for the immediate or visible potential, the end product will be an aware citizenry able to find or make its own opportunities.

“Samoa needs an entire people able to make decisions. We have to prepare them. If we leave it to chance we will get a race of bellhops and chambermaids exploited not just by outside interests but by those of their own people who have managed to get further along,” the official continued.

Assuming this philosophy, it is possible to see the alternatives facing the new Governor Lee when he arrived in 1961.

One was to continue the status quo where most elementary schooling was in one-room village fales or huts conducted by teachers whose background often extended little beyond the sixth grade. The end result in the early 1960s was an American Samoa where less than one per cent of the students were educated up to U.S. standards. This alternative was clearly unacceptable.

The second was a major uplift. This would have involved not only new schools and better training for Samoan teachers but perhaps importation of 300 or more teachers from the U.S. Mainland to go out into the villages — that with all the economic and social implications and matters of face that would be involved for both Samoan and American teachers. It could have been done, perhaps on a Peace Corps-like basis. But the history of the Peace Corps in the Trust Territory indicates it would not be cheap, easy, or certain of success.

The third alternative was doing something else. That’s where ETV came in.

Samoan classroom teacher prepares class for ETV session

A High Cost?

It has cost money in what some (especially foreign) critics charge is a ridiculously high ratio for the number of students in relation to the educational budgets of other Pacific colonies and new nations.

It cost over $2.8 million to set up the ETV technical system, not counting the schools, which would have to have been built in any event. The educational operating budget is over $3 million and climbing toward $4 million, rightfully far and away the biggest item in the American Samoan budget.

Officials on other Pacific Islands are shocked when told the per pupil cost for education in American Samoa is $468 a year. But it is not much when measured against the U.S. average of $564, the need based on past neglect, or the capability of a nation able to spend $30 billion a month on the Vietnam war. It would be worth a much higher cost — if it works in terms of advancing education in Samoa.

Physically what we have now are 24 consolidated elementary schools, three secondary schools (including Manua’s), and a fourth high school being completed in isolated eastern Tutuila. This system is served by six TV channels with transmitters and towers located on 1600-foot Mount Alava, which rises straight above Pago Pago Harbor and is reached by one of the world’s great serial cable car rides.

Lesson production is done in two massive buildings far below by the harbor. There dozens of American and Samoan teachers and technicians work at producing the lessons that are both taped for broadcast a few days later and the printed text material that is shipped out beforehand to teachers for back-up use in class on the day of the lesson. (There are no textbooks as such, and special effort is made to relate the material to the world, as Samoans know it. Thus lessons do not assume children know what a train or snow looks like. How well this lesson preparation works with rather short-time American teachers and Samoan apprentices is one of the many good questions about ETV.)

The schools themselves are in standardized design patterns, handsome Samoan fale-inspired structures of typhoon-proof wood and cement grouped around a central area.

The exotic but most common sight of ETV in Samoa is enough to excite and delight the romantic and idealistic and to raise question marks in the minds of the cynics: For there in clean semi-darkened rooms are some of the world’s handsomest children, mostly barefoot and often wearing only lava lavas or sarongs, sitting intently on mats watching, listening, repeating, and answering as an American teacher goes through a carefully produced taped lesson on the class TV set. Hovering nearby in the fale-classroom is the kindly Samoan teacher, watching and helping as the lesson goes on.

Actually this is only part of the day. Officials stress that while TV is the main medium of instruction, children spend only about a quarter of their school day watching the tube. The rest is spent in preparation for the coming lesson, pointing out basic concepts, etc., and in follow-up drill by the classroom teacher.

It was charged that ETV, with its electronics and influx of American teachers, would destroy the role of the Samoan teacher. Actually an American official may have put the resultant situation more accurately: “If anything, the Samoan teachers are working harder and learning more themselves.” (There is, however, the good if separate question of whether Americans are phasing themselves out fast enough in place of trained Samoan replacement in all levels of government.

Songs and flag raising begin Samoan school day

Everyone involved says he can see the progress in the elementary schools in the last four years, especially among those children who started right from the beginning with ETV. But there is much quiet head shaking and some honest admissions that things have not gone as well at the secondary level; it is a problem that remains to be solved.

To the sympathetic but educationally unsophisticated visitor, this is not especially surprising:

For one thing, the students who went into the ETV high schools were products of an admittedly miserable elementary system, both in terms of academic achievement and discipline. They are teenagers (and older) growing up in a fast-changing cultural system. Where the elementary schools could depend upon a certain local-village pride to help preserve order, the high schools sometimes see inter-village fighting. To make matters worse, the handsome circular fale-like classroom buildings sometimes turned into acoustical nightmares, blending TV and teacher voices from-various classes. “Although maybe we haven’t quite got the handle on the high schools yet, we are learning and getting there. And we can look forward to the kids who have been ETV educated in elementary schools coming up,” says an official.

That probably contains the essential point about ETV’s effectiveness in American Samoa: As Jack Stoltz, a Los Angeles educator who was principle of Leone High School in rural Tutuila put it: “The payoff in ETV here will come in six or eight years when the first kids have come all the way through the system, and then later when we see how they do in college.”

Other Areas?

Whether ETV’s experiment in American Samoa will payoff as an example for use elsewhere is another good question. For some the cost makes the idea prohibitive, and for others the level of doubt is very high indeed. I found no great special jealousy, of American ETV nearby in poor but independent Western Samoa, for example, although many there have sets and avidly watch the to 10 p.m. adult education and U.S. commercial shows carried on two channels of the Pago Pago station. (There is the story of how Western Samoa’s Prime Minister reportedly asked Governor Lee to reschedule a popular series such as “Gunsmoke” so he could view it when it didn’t interfere with hours set aside for religious worship.)

Roy Cobb, American Samoa’s educational director and a four-year veteran of the ETV program there, says his attendance at foreign conferences and talks indicates a growing awareness of what is being attempted:

 “When our critics come and stay a while they realize what we have is not a TV show but an educational system that makes maximum use of television. . . . I think we are using TV with more success and expertise than any other place. But we have really just scratched the surface on what there is to learn….”

Cobb feels that TV’s technical problems of distance limiting transmission will be solved in five years with the use of satellite systems. That, for example, would remove an obstacle for use of ETV in such a vast area as the U.S. Trust Territory or Australian New Guinea.

This is a long way from Manua where we gathered that sunny Saturday. But so is the idea that the grandchildren of Margaret Mead’s subjects are now cheerfully coming of age via ETV.

View from ETV high school across Tau village to other Manua Islands

Received in New York September 26, 1968.

© 1968  John Griffin

Mr. John Griffin is an Alicia Patterson Fund award winner on leave from the Honolulu Advertiser, Honolulu, Hawaii. This article may be published with credit to Mr. Griffin, the Honolulu Advertiser, and the Alicia Patterson Fund.