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Tuesday, September 14, 1971
University Daily Kansan
KANSAN comment
Grappling With Grades
Classes. Assignments. Reading.
Research. Pressure. KU. The semester is on—in fact it is now just over two weeks gone. Entering freshmen have found that college is a hard job. High school counselors had pictured it. Some are happy with what they have found; some are not.
Upper classmen have attended two weeks of those courses that they dreaded, didn't care about or looked forward to during enrollment week.
Regardless of age or classification, all students have one bit of knowledge in common. They all know how their instructors will arrive at that single letter of evaluation that will go onto their transcripts next January. In fact, grading is almost always the first or second item on the first day's agenda in every class.
One teacher may tell the students in his classes he will grade them down if they cut class too frequently. Another may tell students they must submit extra work in order to earn that all-important "A." Still another may simply say he will give three examinations and grade on a straight percentage basis without deviation. The list could go on and on. Teachers use a myriad of grading methods.
Supposedly, students attend school to learn. But historically that has never been true. Almost from its very beginnings, the school system has attempted to act as judge and jury of a student's intelligence. It has been rigid and granted little room for error.
This causes us to wonder. We wonder about teachers who urge students to write a paper or to read a book not to learn but to gain a grade. We wonder about an educational system that forces teachers to do so because it puts a premium not on what a student learns in relation to what he knew before and on how he peers, without taking account of any experiences or background information he may have had. We wonder whether all this is right. We know it is not just.
Grades in themselves have very nearly become an absolute indicator. Look at the requirements for law school and medical school Or at the selection criteria of honorary groups.
Well, you may say, the educational system reflects society as a whole. Does not that society more or less grade each individual by measuring his achievements against those of his peers?
Ah yes, we say, the educational system reflects society but is not that reflection distorted? Is there any other institution that forces a set pace and discipline on them so hardly when they fall? We think not.
You don't agree? You think top grades automatically insure a reward from society. Have a frank talk with some company representatives on campus for job interviews. You'll be surprised.
What's more, is the parallel so often drawn between the rewards society offers and the rewards the government all that valid? Again, we think not.
The grading system, even as first conceived, was obsolete and self-defeating. It has always put and always will put a premium on a student's studying in such a way as to be able to answer a certain exam question or to give his instructor a certain, understood feedback. This is not to say that all teachers consider their own views to be absolute. But enough do, especially at grade and high school levels, that the student soon casts his own mind on "how to study" the important-looking books in the high school counselor's office put it. He learns to control any urge to drop everything in search of knowledge of a specific subject. The reason? His marks in other classes might fall. He learns what his teachers are likely to ask on tests. In short, he becomes a product of the system who will learn only when forced to.
And so we wonder and hope that somehow, somewhere, a new educational system will be created. A system that from the first instillis a love of learning and a sense of inquiry in all students. A system in which course requirements, class attendance and grades are secondary to the student's needs and expectations, evaluation serves to show the student where he has gone wrong, not as immediate castigation for failure. In short, an educational system that is truly educational.
We wish change would be immediate but know it will not. Somehow, though, we see a faint beam of hope. The old guard of the boom system is beginning to weaken and to reassess their position.
Nixon's Electoral Economics
We even had an instructor who did not so much as mention his grading system on the first day of class.
—Dick Hay
Garry Wills
NEW YORK-The President's economic moves were, on balance, better than nothing—but they shouldn't be the them. They should be treated as an experiment that tests the public as well as the administration-teaches both of their strengths, and could, what still has to be done.
THE PROBING or testing nature of the package led to what might be called its heavyhanded "everhandedness." Its self-tailored more than electoral politics than to economic reality.
The combination is self-
The wage-price freeze is meant to suggest an impartial stance toward labor and business. The wage freeze, we are to conclude, puts the same restraint on labor that the price-freeze puts on labor; the wage freeze is "restraining itself" in the areas of taxation and welfare—this to allay fears of control and creeping "big-governmentism."
crippling. The government is trying to have more control and less control at the same time. It is trying to control "prices" instead of corporations (which it does not want to control), in order to get more control over unions, which it would like to control, but feels it can't).
Nixon's economic sanctions are "omnidirectional half-measures," says Garry Wills. And he sees labor slipping from left to right as a consequence.
THIS POLITICAL attempt to please everybody leads to a kind of dithering that exasperates them, even when evenhanded, not tough enough on labor or business. It tampers with the economic process, to the horror of free market pests, yet it manages to maintain its artificial a stage to be truly effective.
Take the unions. They are the earlier aggressor in the process of wage-price spirals. They are the force that country out of the worldwide labor market. Their rhetoric of want, combined with the power of robber barons, make them a flamboyant anachronism. Any
long-range attempt to stop the mutual escalation of wages and prices must go to the root—i.e., the unions' power to cripple companies. If they fail, the nation, if they do not get their recurrent contract demands.
Simply to freeze wages is to come in too late in the process, and scatter shot over too large an area. It penalizes those who are unable to work because of bloc, or those parts of the bloc whose contract-renewal time
came after the freeze instead of before it.
IT IS Difficult, of course, for a politician to take on the unions. Their power, though diminishing on the electoral "left" (with the realization that they do not, any more, represent real want) is increasing on the political fronts of the American middle class). It used to be said that no Democratic administration could take on the unions. But now we have a Republican administration
trying to reach just those people-i.e., the ethnics, Catholics, hardtats, whatever—who have privilege without cause in it, who hope the unions can retain that marginal privilege.
The reaction of George Meany and others shows how labor feels about attacks on the outer palings of its power, much less on the citadel itself. But such power can overreach itself. You cannot be naudirectional half-measures, to molly the union leaders. If he is going to lose them anyway, he might as well attack the real abuses, rather than their after-effects. Or, if he does not, some later President, learning from his experience, may do it—perhaps a Democrat, thus completing what he muted political spectrum from (respectively) Left to (relatively) Right.
COPYRIGHT, 1971, UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE
James J. Kilpatrick
Behavioral Engineering Attacked
WASHINGTON—One of the year's most important books will be published this month by Alfred A. Knopf. It is "Beyond Freedom and Dignity," by B.F. Skinner, a work at once monstrous and terrifying—monstrous in its error, terrifying in its truth. One turns the last page with an unsteady hand.
Skinner is among the world's most distinguished and influential phychologist. His particular field is the study of behavior, especially as related to environmental changes. In his utopian novel, "Walden Two," published in 1948, he put some of his ideas into fictional form. This new book, written by a woman, is a friction aside. It is as cold as the stainless steel tables of a morgue.
IN SKINNER' s view, the human race is creeping blindly toward catastrophe. This is because man stupidly persists in viewing himself as essentially
autonomous--that is, as a creature possessed of free will, capable of making independent decisions. But the decisions that have resulted from his exercise of will have brought to the verge of famine and holocaust he need; he says, "to make vast changes in human behavior."
These necessary changes cannot be achieved, Skinner tells us, merely by exhorting them to be good. Neither is there anything to be gained from folk wisdom or "these collections of personal experience called history."
"WHAT WE NEED is a technology of behavior. We could solve our problems quickly if we could adjust the growth of the world's population as precisely as we adjust the course of a spaceship."
Skinner assures us that the science of behavior—the making of such precise adjustments—is not beyond the reach of the human mind to the minds to think. A vast deal of the technology of control already is known. Indeed—and this is part of the terrifying quality of it—we can tell if it already in use. Even now we are subject to felt and unfelt
"reinforcers," by which we are rewarded for conduct deemed socially good and punished for conduct deemed socially bad.
But the control mechanisms applied thus far have failed to produce a contented and well-ordered society largely because the mechanisms have been too weak or too drastically trobe"—this is Skinner's word for the human being—has evaded effective manipulation by insisting on his freedom. Man tends to resist even those controls that would give him a better view, his cannot be permitted to continue.
"THE PROBLEM," says Skinner, "is to design a world which will be liked not by people as they now are, but by those who live in it." Men must be induced to like controls—to like controls more than they like freedom. "What is needed is more control, not less." He argues that Skinner's solution lies in the control of human behavior: "Nothing is to be gained by using a sister word."
How would they the "controllers" and "designers" be selected? Skinner does not say. How would they be restrained from new forms of despotism? His
unconvincing answer is that controllers always are restrained to some extent (they can be used as besides, the controller himself will be subject to the controls he devises for society as a whole. "He will select goods and values which are important"
SKINNER'S MONUMENTAL error, in my own view, lies in his scientist's assumption that man is essentially no more than another mouse in a cage. If the behavior of a mouse can be altered by controlled changes, it follows that man's behavior can be altered also. To be sure, this concept requires that autonomous man—the man defended against him—must be abolished. Let him go, says Skinner. "His abolition has long been overdue."
But men are not mice-at least not yet—and cannot be so easily put away. The human race may indeed be beheaded for catastrophe if it continues along its present disorderly course, but it surely would find catastrophe of a different sort if it yields to Controller Skinner's grand design.
(C) 1971 The Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
'I'm a Prisoner'
Khruschev's Last Public Words
Editor's Note: Associated Press Correspondent James R. Reipert was one of the last two Westerners known to have seen Nikita Khrushchev. He and another newspaper reporter met with Nikita Khrushchev and his wife when they made their last public appearance in June.
JAMES R. PEIPERT
Associated Press Writer
MOSCOW  (AP) “I’m a
pensioner now. What can
a pensioner do?”
This is how Nikita Gergeyevich Krushchev, who once held supreme power in the Soviet Union, described his seven years of imprisonment topped by his posts of premier and Communist party chief.
HHRUSHCHEV made his remarks to two Western correspondents who were on hand for his last address, when he cried his vote at a Moscow polling place in national elections for
Supreme Soviet parliament members.
Although Khruschev had lived in obscurity since 1964, millions of Russians were still familiar with the figure, bald head and warted nose.
"IT'S NIKTIA Sergeevich, 'u's Nikita Sergeevich," whispered a crowd of Russians gathered behind her as she placed as a chauffeur-driven black Vulpel pulled to the curb with his wife, Nina Petrovna, insided.
Khrushevius, looking trim and fit despite a recurring heart aliment called 'cardia deficiency' from the anemia and display of the flamboyance that made his name a household word around the world. He deftified his straw hat to the crowd, waved, exchanged mantras and walked with Mrs. in the schoolhouse polling place.
Letters Policy
KHRUSHEV was wearing a red tie and the height of his power; the gold star of Hero of the Soviet Union, hanging by a scarlet ribbon on his neck.
Letters to the editor should be typewritten, double-spaced and should not exceed 500 words. All letters are subject to editing and condensation, according to course limitations and the editor's judgment. Students must provide their name, position, faculty and staff must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
medallion of the Lening Peace Prize on his right lapel. The Russians cleared a path for the team in the Elementary School No 29, where they dropped their ballots in a box at the school's recreation hall.
AFTER ABOUT five minutes in the school, the Khruschevs emerged and strolled back to their car, smiling and greeting well-wishers into their car into their衣, walked good-bye and drove off.
an apartment in a well-kneel gray stone building a five-minute walk away, near the Candian church, which is one of the time in a country cottage.
The school at 12 Kropkotin-
skaya Street was the polling
place for the Khruhscheh's
neighborhood. They maintained
The neighborhood where they kept the apartment was called the Old Arab and was the fashionable district of imperial officers and taurid princes and the Bohsehiris, seized power in 1917.
The area, with its quiet treelined streets, is now the home of Russians who have done well under communism. Bolshoi dancers, writers and retired officials have homes there.
F
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