Portrait of a materials center

Essentially the MATERIALS CENTER is the culmination of an educational concept-a concept so basic that it may well save the day America's courageous attempt to accomplish what no other nation in the world's history has undertaken before: complete and continuing education all of the people from cradle to grave. In two words this concept may be called multi-materials. In a few more words it may be simply stated that good teaching.is good communication between teacher and pupil; and the key to good communication is acquaintance with and accessibility to a wide range of instructional materials. Providing such acquaintance and accessibility teachers and pupils is the mission of the MATERIALS CENTER. How the MATERIALS CENTER does this today varies from separate and conventional school libraries or centers, in some schools, to integrated resource centers in entire school systems. In between these two extremes are various degrees of evolution toward the ultimate MATERIALS CENTER. What that ultimate MATERIALS CENTER will be is still open to experiment and discussion. What it will probably not be seems more certain. It does not appear likely the American school will go for separate and library centers in each building. Economically, the small school cannot afford such separation, and most American schools are still small. Educationally, it is almost impossible to divide Instructional Materials into audio-visual and non-audio-visual. Even if one accepts symbolically the 16mm. motion picture as audio-visual

Audio visual · Center (category theory · Mathematics education · Multimedia · Pedagogy · Sociology · Computer Science · Library Science and Administration · Library Science and Information Literacy · Psychology