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University Daily Kansan
Friday, Nov. 22, 1963
Humbug
Walk down Massachusetts street and you are greeted by smiling Santas and Christmas bells.
This is great. But in November?
Humbug.
It is getting pretty ridiculous when KU-MU football games are on poles topped by Christmas decorations.
THIS IS sacrilegious—both to Christmas and to football.
November used to be the month of football, turkeys and recovering from Halloween jokes, but tomorrow someone may try to sing "Rock Chalk, Jayhawk" to the tune of "Jingle Bells."
Although sentiment may be rather out of place in this aloof, super-sophisticated college generation, Christmas used to be enjoyable—carols, happy faces, egg nog, cheery greetings, and most of all, December.
It seems a shame that merchants can't wait another few weeks for the 5-Shopping Days-to- Christmas hysteria.
IT USED to be possible to do Christmas shopping early and avoid the Christmas markup. Now, the blasted Halloween goblin masks have to battle it out with reindeer for equal space.
I'm watching the paper for the great air crash between Santa Claus and the wicked witch.
The psychological effect of Christmas on the shopper is definitely good for the merchant. Shoppers are more free with their money when Santa is watching.
Let's hope the department store Santa's don't get too warm in the balmy November weather.
WHAT IS MOST disgusting is the change in emphasis on Christmas. Shopping used to be part of Christmas. Now, the advertisements seem to tell us, Christmas is part of a lucrative commercial system. The money changers' methods of making a fast buck off the Babe in the Manger have just been updated a bit.
If the spirit surrounding Christmas—good will toward men, peace on earth—went along with the November Christmas shopping, the situation would be tolerable. But more likely, the merchants have compared their December sales with those of other months, and want as much more of a good thing as they can get.
There is more meaning to Christmas than simply a business boom. Leaving all the Sunday School teachings which were so popular a few years ago out of the argument, the least the merchant could do is emulate the Christmas spirit he advertises and leave the slick- four-color advertising posters in the packing case.
We'll just have to put up with the fake Christmas in November. The real thing, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, should follow in a month or two.
It is obviously futile to try to take the $ out of Xma$ .
Facts of Life
Mike Miller
"It's a pretty well-known fact," said the Radcliffe sophomore matter-of-factly, "that sex goes on in every college."
Well, at the risk of disillusioning the young lady about her staid elders, the fact of the matter is that she's got her tenses mixed. Sex not only goes on now; it has always went. It's only youthfulness that makes the young think they have discovered something new.
Still, it's not only her tenses that are mixed. Nor, regrettably, only the young who are mixed up. For the young lady's remark was intended not simply as an observation but as an argument for more permissive rules on dating in college bedrooms. And it's an argument rather widely accepted these days by the authorities of a number of colleges, including the presidents of Harvard and Radcliffe.
Some of these authorities, moreover, aren't particularly disturbed by the scandals that have erupted in such places as Harvard. Said the president of next-door Radcliffe, in a tone implying that this settled the matter, "The situation does not seem any different from that in previous years."
What is displayed here, then, both by the young and their elders, is an argument that goes something like this: Young people will do certain things . . . whether they have to do with drinking or dating or anything else . . . whether the authorities approve or not. Moreover, the young people who choose to will find ways and places of doing those things whatever the rules. Therefore, the thing to do is to be "realistic" and do away with stuffy rules.
As for the particular case of the dating rules, it seems to us that any thoughtful parent might offer a reply. Every parent knows he cannot really control his children's behavior when they are away from home. Yet no good parent would therefore encourage their sons or daughters to date in the bedroom.
In short, there is a vast difference between recognizing human frailty and in lending to it the seeming sanction of authority. The wisdom of the decalogue is not repealed because some adults commit adultery.
TITLE
Sometimes this permissivenes has begun in the home. Quite often it has begun in the elementary school where pupils have been permitted to wander about at will, where even discipline in learning was eschewed because it might repress the growing child. It has followed right on through much of the educational process where, even in some high schools, the student need not attend classes unless he chooses.
The effects of this ripple everywhere. In a relatively trivial form, we have a new dictionary that will not say any usage is "right" or "wrong" but all is permissive. The usages of manners, too, so we are told by some arbiters of etiquette, are often but rituals not necessarily to be observed.
Not at all so trivially—and perhaps not unconnected with the scandals at Harvard—the drugstore shelves are laden with other books that make thoughtful men uneasy because no authority any longer dares say what is pornography and what is not.
Recently some adults were shocked when a group of young people tore up a house after a young people's party. Yet in all the deploring comments it never occurred to anyone to ask. Where were the chaperones? The very word would have brought the young people to anger and made the adults quail. These young people were all of 18 and 19 years old. Who was to tell them what to do or not do?
All this is not intended as a jeremiaid against society. We have lately had some experience with young folk of college age and we've been impressed with the makings of the next generation. Indeed, one of the things that has impressed us is that much of their familiar rebellion is part of the restless search for guides to live by. As for adults, we suspect that in every age there have been only a few to raise up standards, to abide by them and to seek to pass them on.
What is troubling, rather, is that those few now in a position where their duty is to instruct seem to have abdicated. The lexicographer afraid of applying his authority to grammar and a college president who retreats behind moral permissiveness are equally shirking their responsibilities.
It is all very well to say—which is true—that young people must evolve their own rules of right living and right action, for unless they have them within then all outward rules are futile. But if teachers teach that everything which is done is somehow thereby acceptable, who will raise up the standards to which the young may repair?
—In the Wall Street Journal
"He Says That After The Bloodletting He Can Bring Us Peace"
Viewpoint
Tomorrow's Problems Will Need Creativity
Today you have to run hard to stand still. If a plane is off the drawing board and flying, it is obsolete. If an engineer can see an electrical apparatus, it is too big. Newspapers are old before they hit the presses.
Such examples show how fast the world of technology is moving ahead.
In 1910, the Army's military airplanes were guaranteed to fly at 40 m.p.h. In 1942, military planes were zipping along at 200 m.p.h. By the end of 1945, military planes were flying more than 470 m.p.h. Military planes today can fly in excess of 1600 m.p.h.
TO GIVE SOME idea of the amount of technology going on, 90% of all the technicians who ever lived are living today. Compare this with the present human population—which represents 50% of all the people ever born on earth.
Scientific achievements, as much as the arts, are based on one abstract quality, creativity, found in every person but exploited by only a few.
Before a person can pass from an imaginative stage to the creative category, he must overcome five basic stiflers:
IN COLLEGES, too often professors think the old way is the only way. Many professors are guilty of three stiflers: fixation, habits and conformity.
- Lack of confidence, wide-spread in most people;
These five factors have always been stifling creativity. Schools, colleges, businesses, industries and governments are always shot through with them.
- Habits, "we've always done it this way;"
AN EXAMPLE OF this is in the physics department at KU. If a student doesn't solve a problem by the professor's method, a correct answer will receive only partial credit or none at all. This shows fixation on the professor's part. Such practices are defended on the grounds that; the method we teach has been correct since the times of Gallileo; why can't the student do it our way?; by showing their work, the students prove they didn't cheat; if everyone uses the same method, the tests are easier to grade.
- Fixation, the inability to see known objects as having new uses, and
- Super perfectionism, the fear that a project is not complete enough to be presented.
Tomorrow's problems cannot all be solved with yesterday's answers.
- Conformity, the fear of going against accepted practices;
Without creativity, all of us can be replaced with a computer.
Such stifling professors stand out most vividly in courses involving the teaching of technique or approach to problems.
Such defenses are too numerous to count, but all add up to stifling the creativity of the student.
-T. S. Moore
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