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University Daily Kansan Tuesday, May 12. 1959
Inadequate English
The editorial staff of the Wichita Beacon is appalled at the high percentage of failures announced after KU's last English Proficiency examination.
In a lead editorial last week, the Beacon placed most of the blame for the failures with the teachers of the public schools, and to a lesser degree, with the English department at KU.
The editorial suggests that a great improvement in the general scholarship of University students could be made if all teachers were required to pass the examination before they could teach.
This is a reasonable idea. However, it is unlikely that this would lower the percentage of student failures. It seems probable that every English teacher at the University could pass the examination with ease.
The reason many students do so poorly in English is not that their instructors fail to grasp the language. It is more probable that this knowledge, particularly the fundamentals, is not properly taught to the would-be learners.
English grammar and usage are sadly lacking in the freshman and sophomore English courses taught at the University. Literature, as it should
be, is emphasized. Composition is stressed. However, it is assumed that the student coming from high school already has a command of English fundamentals.
Unfortunately, as the proficiency examination bears out, this is not the case. A freshman, entering the University, receives little or no basic grammar unless he flunks the English portion of the entrance examinations. Thus, if a student barely makes a passing score on the entrance test, emphasis on grammar becomes a thing of the past for him.
It is not at all difficult to achieve a passing score on this test. With a little luck in the multiple guessing games, any freshman can become "grammar qualified."
This could be remedied by making the English entrance requirements more in line with actual needs. It would follow, then, that more grammar would have to be taught to those who proved they were in need of it.
With a proper command of the basic English fundamentals, there is no reason for any student to fail an examination in which he merely has to write two essays on subjects of his choice.
—George DeBord
Chastity Revisited
Editor:
The relatively wide acceptance of my recent ridicule of virginity or chastity amazed me since I had expected rather strong criticism and vehement refusal. (Of course it might be that disagreeing students do not talk to me any more.)
We have to realize however that in agreeing to the proposition that today virginity and chastity are of purely sentimental value and based on old superstitions, we have done only a minor part of the job. The hard work starts in actively trying to stand for the issue and in attempting to change our social institutions, in order to terminate unjustified infringement on personal freedoms.
We, as students, supposedly the intellectual elite of the country, will have to make the idea of premarital intercourse socially acceptable or at least legal. The abolishment of closing hours will mean one step in this change to come in the next 10 or 20 years. (There is no question that chastity is very closely related to closing hours; if this weren't the case, what would be the reason for closing hours, and why are there no closing hours for boys?)
The change will certainly not come from outside. I do not exaggerate when saying that probably our parents will not help us achieve our goal, or will even oppose our intentions. We students will have to take action to change our institutions, even if this means consciously defying present regulations and social norms. We will have to stand for our love and not feel guilty or ashamed, but proud of being a human being again.
I say proud of being human because we can neither reduce a love relationship to a mere physical, nor to a more mental event. Denying the physical aspect is to deny oneself as a human being with the consequence of harmful mental and physical effects.
Assistant Instructor of Western Civilization
Harald Meyer
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Critic Criticizes
The response I have received to my letter printed May 1 is a tribute to the service this column provides. Praise has been the most usual reply to my views, but this contrasts with the May 6 letter of Stewart Nowlin, Holton sophomore.
Editor:
Because of my belief in God, opinions against chastity supported by slopism are not sufficient for me. Self-justification is a deceitful, man-made balm, and my adversary would be classified by Will James as among the embalmed "healthy-minded" who are just learning about their "sick-soul."
Although Mr. Nowlin does not
...Letters...
consider the Apostle Paul as an authority, I feel impressed to recommend his writing in I Cor. 13: 9-12, which reads in part, "now we see through a glass darkly."
From the comments of some of the men, girls might wisely ask about their boy friends' ideas on extra-marital sexual experience.
Bob Krahl
Lawrence senior
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Move to Adjourn
I would ask that both Mr. Krahl and Mr.Nowlin be a little more realistic in their views.
Mr. Krahl: Our ideas now are, as is often historically noted, somewhat derived from the scientific climate of opinion. As always, the philosophers are a little behind the scientific views of the day.
Just as it took many years for the philosophers of the 19th century to catch up to Darwin by changing their ethics and ideals to complement that theory of his, so it has taken many years again for the 26th century philosophers to catch up to the revolutionary ideas of Freud and Einstein.
After the philosopher came the intelligentsia. That's us. Today nothing is absolute—everything is relative, even religion and virginity. We who religiously try to follow in the steps of our parents sometimes become quite impatient and illogical in our arguments. We must be logical if we are to "enlighten" the philosophers. But they are happy so why worry about them?
Mr. Nowlin: I would like for you to read and carefully consider the Ten Commandments. I think that you will find good common sense behind each of the ten. This God, who many of us worship, knows man; He created him. Within man He put passion.
That passion is expressed in many ways other than the actual act of intercourse. It is expressed in writing prose and poetry, it is expressed in love, it is expressed in all ways that make man more than just an animal. To deny physical love from all but one person makes this man more of a man than an animal. It allows him to realize the beauty of his conscience and his will.
As far as experience goes, if both members of a marriage bond are "inexperienced," but are in love, then they can learn the beauty of sexual love together and achieve a greater fulfillment than those who will not abstain from premarital relationships.
Marion O. Redstone Parsons junior
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS BY BIBLER
"JUST A MINUTE THERE 57!"
By Jerry Knudson Instructor of Journalism
HORIZON, May 1959. Vol. I, No. 5. $3.95.
A memorandum from Seneca to Tennessee Williams (ghosted by Gilbert Highet) appears in this issue of "Horizon." The memorandum is a "fan message" concerning Williams' special brand of horror.
Seneca obviously knows whereof he speaks. He once had a father piece together on stage the mangled remains of his son, clipped by a runaway chariot. His period of Roman melodrama also witnessed the body of Icarus falling from the sky to the stage with such impact that blood spattered the audience.
The man who may become the towering American dramatist of this century then scuttled off to Key West to write a domestic comedy to be called "Adjustment Period."
"Not About Nightingales" remains to be produced. In its gory climax several convicts are roasted alive in their cell. Seneca applauds such goings-on but admonishes Williams that the curtain falls too soon in "Suddenly Last Summer" in which the young poet is killed and eaten by a savage group of starving children.
The same could be said for the third act of "A Streetcar Named Desire," Seneca continues. Why not show the audience what happens when Stanley Kowalski attacks Blanche? (Of course, an understudy might be needed for matinee performances, Seneca concedes.)
In "Orpheus Descending" Seneca wants to see the mob leader apply the blowtorch to the hero; in "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" the master horror technician would like to see gigantic cancer cells, created by special lighting effects, consume the house as Big Daddy writhes in agony.
Seneca could find unlimited possibilities for horror in Williams, Gilbert Highet concludes.
Another article in this issue by William K. Zinsser examines the accuracy of motion pictures representing national ways of life. The answer to "Is it true what the movies say about...?" is "Hardly ever," according to the author.
Zinsser was movie critic for the New York Herald Tribune for many years. His impressions from films are that nude bathing is commonplace in Sweden, French husbands never go home to their own beds (and would find nobody there if they did), and the U.S. is shown as a phony South, unreal West, and over-glamorous New York.
The Italians were most honest after World War II with such films as "Open City," "Paisan," "Shoe Shine," and "The Bicycle Thief," but this brutal realism did not appeal to home audiences, so the Italian film also retreated into illusion.
Some American films have been faithful to their subject matter, however. Notable are "Picnic" which captures the feeling of small town life in the Midwest and "Peyton Place" whose authentic New England settings reveal something of life in that region.
American pictures like "Blackboard Jungle" do create an unfavorable picture of the U.S. abroad, but the propaganda effect sometimes backfires. The Kremlin sponsored "The Grapes of Wrath" in Russia withwithdrew the film when officials discovered the Russian people envied the Okies for their car, however ancient.
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MYTH: A SYMPOSIUM, edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1958, $4.
This symposium contains nine contributions on the nature of myth—some doctrinaire like Lord Raglan's one-sided view that all myth originates in ritual, to say nothing of S. E. Hyman's attempt to relate literature to the same source.
One is reminded of Procrustes, who stretched his guests to fit the length of his bed. The most interesting contributions are Richard Dorson's fair-minded account of the controversy between the solar myth school (Max Muller and his followers) and the anthropological school, led by Andrew Lang; David Bidney's "Myth, Symbolism, and Truth," which points out that, though myth supplies patterns for the artist and writer, it is not the product of a special faculty, and is not identical with actual historical beliefs; and Stith Thompson's "Myths and Folktales," providing a wholesome corrective to the monistic approaches to myth that spring from one of man's most dangerous passions—his passion for unity.
-C.K.H
Dailu Hansan
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