It retains still too many of those abominations - tests and examinations.

My whole department's in-service training institute this year was taken over by
Northwestern University. Our workers can get University credit for broadening

the base of their professional competence, while working on the job as employees

of the Park system. Sixty-cight percent of them already have degrees on the
college level, but many of the staff of over 300 are working towards Masters or
Doctors degrees. All are attending one course which attempts to combine into a
working unity, as a practical scientific approach, with special reference to
application to our community problems, the three social scicnces - Psychology,
Sociology, and Education. At the end of our specially adapted Psychology unit

this winter, we were subject to a true or false examination. The results convinced
me that that form of cite in other than purely factual studies closes the door
upon possibility of cultivating any original thinking whatsoever. Those who are
our most creative thinkers were conspicuously low in their grades. Our wax plates,
on the other hand, set the needle, turned on the phonograph, and gave back just
what the lecturer had said, and became thereby the honor students! Hore was a
premium placed on stupid memorizing - a penalty attached to the forming of independ-
ent judgments. Doesn't education today face a challenge to be more concerned than
that in cultivating the ability to think for one's self?

As a layman, it seems to me that education ought to do more than it is doing
currently in my daughter's case, in an Eastern college. In her senior year there,
majoring in Philosophy, she wanted this year to write her honor thesis on the
subject of the Philosophy of our current youth movements. Before finishing high
school, she went on a Youth Hostel tour of Europe. Before entering College she
took another hostelling trip to Japan. She was vastly interested in the attitude
toward life of the youth she contacted abroad. Through her college years, she

has attended the Youth Congresses, except for the recent one in Washington. She |

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