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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Dec. 1, 1955
You Can Reduce Traffic Deaths
If you take at least one minute reading this, two persons will have been injured in a traffic accident by the time you have finished.
Total up one injury every 25 seconds for a year, you get 1,250,000 people. That's how many were disabled beyond the day of the accident last year.
The total number killed was 36,000—more than four times the University's total enrollment. Of the 36,000,23 per cent were between the ages of 18 and 24—that's us.
And these accidents weren't caused by mechanical defects. The total of unsafe brakes, lights, steering mechanisms, and blowouts and other unsafe conditions caused only six per cent of the accidents. In the rest of the fatal accidents no unsafe condition existed.
proved that accidents can be reduced when drivers are conscious of safety and concentrating on their driving.
So what? So last year's Safe Driving Day
Today is the second annual S-D Day. Its purpose, again this year, will be to demonstrate that traffic accidents can be greatly reduced when motorists and pedestrians fulfill their moral and civic responsibility for safety.
The challenge to every community is not to have a single traffic accident during this 24 hour period.
The campaign is sponsored by the President's committee for traffic safety in cooperation with national and local civic organizations.
The challenge to you is—Keep your mind on your driving. It's as simple as that. Just keep your mind on your driving.
Keep out of the 23 per cent.
The adherents of English proficiency say the pu:pose of the test is to find out if a college student of a junior standing can write in an intelligent vein. They say if a junior cannot do this then he should not be graduated from College. We wonder why, if the junior cannot write intelligently, he was admitted in the first place.
But, admitting that entrance requirements can be lax and still be efficient in boosting enrollment, we wonder why the junior has to take a proficiency test to prove to someone that he passed courses his freshman year.
Another English proficiency exam has come and gone. We wonder just how long this mess is going to continue. Are graduates really better trained in English composition since the inception of this exam or is it going to be a part of the college scene for all time? If the exam is resulting in better trained graduates, then some purpose can be attached to it. If not, the once-a-semester farce should be scrapped.
Exponents of the test may say that hindsight is better than none at all and it is better to catch an illiterate student in his junior year so that he may be corrected than to fling him out in the world with a degree, minus an inspired pen. These persons point to the gibbering of illiterate engineers, education graduates, and journalists—who cannot transfer thoughts into the written word. Chances are, these graduates should never have been allowed to graduate in their curriculum in the first place, and a portion of them probably should never have been allowed to enroll in college but did because the institution was eager to boost enrollment figures.
K-State Doesn't Like It, Either
Some college administrators pass the buck to the elementary and secondary schools. They say that the quality and methods of teaching English
On the other hand, where were those inep pre-college teachers trained? We have to assume that K-State has had some role in the training of teachers. The circle is completed. The cause and effect can be found on the college campus. The best thing that can be said about this rat-race is that college educators know these causes and effects and are taking steps to correct them.
If this is the case—that college educators are working toward this goal—then he must assume that English Proficiency is but a step in the correction of the situation.
Therefore, in a few years, this lag—it has to be called a lag, since English proficiency has made poor writing a temporary thing—will disappear and the need for teaching high school grammar in college and the English proficiency exam will automatically disappear.
If this is not the case, and the situation cannot be solved in the future by (1) weeding out grammar misfits while still in college thereby (2) improving our standard of graduates, e.g. high school English teachers, and (3) raising English requirements when the "second generation" enrolls in college, then English Proficiency is not accomplishing a thing and should be shown to the nearest junk heap.
have deteriorated in recent decades and that it is the duty of the College to correct these evils by subjecting freshmen to the rigors of Written Communications and juniors to the chaos of the English proficiency exam.
These well-meaning souls say that if the college freshman had been taught English practices in grade and high school they would find English in college neither rigorous nor chaotic.
-Kansas State Collegian
National Holidays Losing Significance
There once was a time when a national holiday meant something to the people of the United States. Nowadays, though, it generally means just a day to catch up on your sleep, mow the lawn, play an extra game of golf, fish, or what not.
Going down the list of some of the remaining legal or public holidays, the first is New Year's Day. That day seems to have fallen into the depths of misty hang-overs, continuing parties, and just plain sleep. Lincoln's and Washington's birthdays are no longer even thought of as holidays from business or school.
Of course, there are possibly 50 or 60 other various holidays celebrated throughout the 48 states on an individual basis. But the big national holidays seem to have been transformed into a group of periods for the tolling of the bell of death on the highways, the apathetic observance of the day by a pitiful few and commercialism on the part of the many.
Christmas Day, along with Thanksgiving, still has some semblance of its original purpose, but lately the cry of commercialism has arisen. If the cries continue, these days will lose all their respectability, what respectability is left.
Independence Day is taken off during the summer, but few citizens of America take the time out to make an official observance of the day. Few states allow a person to celebrate the day by shooting fireworks, as it used to be. The few observances we've seen in the past few years have been on a strict time-table basis, where only qualified professional fireworks people have the fun.
Labor Day, at least in New York and probably everywhere else, is considered the big breather, just before the Fall business cycle sets in. General Election Day is no longer a holiday except for Presidential elections in most states, naturally every four years. Otherwise, an eligible citizen votes when he gets a chance to take off from his usual work-day routine.
Under a headline "Scientists Are Not Squares," we read a story in the Topeka Daily Capital urging that scientists are not really "little old men with beards working in a musty laboratory." One case in point—the head of the astronomy department at Indiana University "holds open house for students at which he plays them a carefully-chosen record concert."
Veteran's Day, a combination of several other holidays, is generally observed by a few of the veteran's organizations, but very few.
Sam L. Jones
..Short Ones..
Kansas hasn't gone completely Ivy league yet and it looks as if the East will never take away our good old traditions. The Legislative council is presently studying the states branding laws. (Livestock branding, that is, pardna.)
Live it up, prof., you're only young once.
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LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS by Dick Bibler
"SPLENDID INTERVIEW—HE'S ECCENTRIC, BLOOTED AN' CONSERVATIVE
HELL MAIL A FINE ADDITION TO THE FACULTY."
... Letters
I am among those fortunate few who don't have to bust their necks driving safely on "S.D." Day since I recently joined the ranks of the pedestrians by driving my car into a telephone pole last Sunday night. As a noviitate in the ranks of pedestrianism, I have become aware of a previously unpublicized attitude prevalent among University students. As I fight my way up the hill on icy mornings, doggedly pushing my tortured body into the face of the arctic blasts, I am passed by more drivers than I can count on my be-mittened hands. (It's too cold to take off my shoes.)
Editor:
Here is no subversive share-the-privileges attitude. No, sir, those warm cars have been paid for by the sweat of the rugged individual's brow and he's not about to share the harvest of his efforts with the pedestrian who must obviously be either a shirker or a bolshevik or he, too, could become a capitalist owner of an auto under our glorious system of free enterprise.
This is the epitome of Americanism, Kansanism, and American Legionism which is not found on the proletariat campus up the Kaw. They slobber sentimentalities to each other like "Hop in," and "How far 'you going?'
Hence, I am taking this opportunity to ask for a round of applause for those KU students who stand as the last bulwark of rugged individualism on American Campi. Bouquets to each and every one!
John Schroeder Education senior
As usual when the Daily Kansan sponsors anything, the full page publicity gets out of hand. I believe that the Miss Santa contest has been completely overplayed for the sake of the School of Journalism.
Editor:
When the Homecoming Queen doesn't even rate a picture following the announcement, the Daily Kansan, on the very same day, can take up a whole page with the Miss Santa contest. Visiting lecturers are lucky to have their names in the paper. But if the Journalism School has a conference, not only does it take up half the front page, but a picture is thrown in for good measure.
When Miss Santa becomes more important than the Homecoming Queen (not to mention the Carnival and Law queens who rated only a small squib) then it seems that the Daily Kansan is not really a lab paper with the purpose of informing the students of the University of ALL University happenings, but rather a publicity sheet for the activities of Flint Hall.
Edith Sortor Education senior
Editor:
I have overheard a number of interesting reactions to your Miss Santa Contest and would like to pass them on to you.
Halleujah and Miss Schoolmarmalade W have not been on speaking terms ever since each discovered that the other plans to enter the contest. Each says the other's face looks more like Santa Claus than Santa Claus's own ("that goes for the whiskers as well as for the color of the nose," Halleujah cackled at her adversary over the phone).
Education major Wimind Frustratemot heartily endorses the event as "one more example of the adolescent socio-educational integrity so vital to the life of an Institution of Higher Learning."
An economist friend, who wishes to remain anonymous, claims that it was inevitable. The day had to come—sooner or later—when the merchants would out-give or out-sell (depending on your point of view) Santa Claus him . pardon, herself).
Dr. Sickmund Deepsole, our consulting psychologist, is puzzled by this strange tradition (not withstanding Flanagan's eloquent praise of its "originality and timeliness"). It is sort of original, in its surrealistic amalgamation of dream legs and whiskers, and it certainly is timely, coming right in December just as the pre-Miss-Santa-Contest Santa Claus always has.
Mr. Wispy
Home craftsmen bought more than $200,000,000 worth of power tools last year.
Daily Hansan
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Member of the Inland Daily Press association. Associated College Association. National Advertising service. 420 Madison avenue. N.Y. Mall subscription rates: $3 a semester or year. University semester. Lawrence. Published Lawrence Kans., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sunday evenings and examination periods. Entered as master, Sept. 17, 1910, at Lawrence, Kan. post office under act of March 3, 1879.
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