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University Daily Kansan Thursday, May 7, 1959
New Ideas Needed
Evaluation of professors comes with the closing of school along with other activities. Even though it may be only a recommendation that a certain course is good for extra sleep the student is nonetheless evaluating that professor.
Too many professors turn a deaf ear to criticism. They have become stodgy and narrow minded in the teaching field.
Too many are content to let students get by year after year giving the same tests, the same problems, reading lectures from the same outlines and making it easy but boring for students. This isn't the mark of an efficient professor, but the mark of a lazy one.
No one is so good that he can't change, keep up to date and introduce new ideas. Students are changing, times are changing and concepts are changing. Why shouldn't professors change?
Many professors even go so far as to openly criticize new teachers who bring new ideas into a department. There are times when new ideas are not tolerated in a department because it will
force those that have the seniority to get down and work more.
Most students (this does not include the ones at the University who are out to win friends and influence people), who are trying to get something out of classes, appreciate time being put into assignments instead of receiving busy work to do that means little or nothing.
Granted, there are those professors who conduct interesting classes from year to year and require the same, or nearly the same, material. However, there can be something done to keep the material up to date and not make students feel as though they were gathering information that had been handed down from the year 1.
It boils down to the fact that stodgy professors who eventually shape up pud courses are not doing a job of teaching to even compliment the intelligence of the majority of college students. Maybe these status quo instructors could spend some of the summer at least thinking about their position as a teacher. Who knows, they might even get some new ideas. —Martha Fitch
And Yet, Nobody Listens
Students and faculty will marvel at all sorts of odd things. They'll sit in rain and snow to watch 22 men kick a football around a field, walk across the campus to see men sit in a tree and make like an owl, or lie on the floor listening to rock and roll singers making a hi-fi set sound like a captive wildcat.
But most students will spend four years of their lives on this campus and never realize they associate each day with one of the most exclusive things the University has to offer.
In 1951, the University imported 45 tons of bells from England and installed them in the campanile. They hired Ronald Barnes, one of the top five men in the country in his field, to play the bells. And yet, few listen.
Mr. Barnes does not climb to the top of the campanile every 15 minutes to ring the bells, although many people think he does. But he does play concerts every Wednesday evening and Sunday afternoon.
Mr. Barnes plays all types of music, including folk music from Europe, the United States, and Canada. For the lover of classics, he plays Bach, Handel, and others. Of the 100 carillons in the United States, ours is one of 30 played regularly. And yet, few listen.
Students do not take the trouble to discover the wind denotes the best place to listen to a carillon concert. You have to be downwind, because the wind carries the sound. The preferable distance from the campanile on a still night is about as far as Potter Lake.
Students do not realize much of the music played is not written for the carillon and must be transcribed. This is a long tedious process in which the music is almost re-written. And yet, nobody listens.
Students are at the University to gain an education and learn to appreciate the arts. A devoted artist spends many hours providing them with some of the best music of its kind in the world. And yet, nobody listens. —Robert Lynn
Review: 'American High School'
(Editor's note: This is the first of two articles on education. This is a review of "The American High School Today" by James B. Conant. The book is published by McGraw-Hill.)
By William York Assistant Professor of Education
"Can a school at one and the same time provide a good general education for all the pupils as future citizens of a democracy, provide elective programs for the majority to develop useful skills, and educate adequately those with a talent for handling advanced academic subjects...?" In brief, can the american high school perform the task it has been assigned?
By the very nature of the question posed, Dr. Conant was led to a study of high schools which are "widely comprehensive" and which were recommended to him as "good schools," rather than to a study of what might be termed "typical schools."
This is the basic question to which James B. Conant directed his attention in his recent study of the American high school and to which he directs the attention of the American people in his study report, "The American High School Today."
On the basis of his study, Dr Conant concludes that the American high school can perform the
In "Education and Liberty." Dr. Conant states additionally that "There is no reason why within a comprehensive high school well supported by the community a boy or girl who has academic ability cannot receive a good education. But the number of such schools . . . is far too few."
three-fold task suggested by his basic question and that " . . . no radical alteration in the basic pattern of American education is necessary in order to improve our public high schools." He does conclude, however, that substantial improvement is necessary and presents 21 specific recommendations toward this end.
Dr. Conant has long been regarded an advocate of the further development of our unique American pattern of public education, including the comprehensive high school.
His present endorsement of the basic pattern suggests merely that his study of the American high school has resulted in a reaffirmation of beliefs which he has stated many times. It is interesting to note that in a discussion of the comprehensive high school in "Education and Liberty," published in 1952, Dr. Conant states: "I am convinced that progress lies in the direction of improving such schools and transforming other types of secondary education to conform with such models."
It is in the presentation of his recommendations for improving public secondary education that Dr. Conant goes one step further in "The American High School Today" than in any of his previous writing. Dr. Conant believes that wide-spread adoption of his recommended practices, each observed in one or more of the selected schools he visited, would result in widespread improvement of
American public secondary education.
He is especially concerned about adaptations designed to promote more rigorous academic programs for academically talented students. He is concerned also, however, that these talented students be provided social and citizenship education experiences shared with a cross section of the high school student population.
Educators and citizens alike, if they endorse the principle of the comprehensive high school, will likely find that they agree substantially with Dr. Conant's observations and recommendations. Persons who hold a more narrow view of what a high school ought to be, however, are likely to find many of Dr. Conant's observations and recommendations irrelevant.
In total the recommendations assume relatively large high schools each with diverse programs and many specialized services provided. The 21 specific recommendations detail the services and organizational adaptations which Dr. Conant deems necessary to provide appropriate education for all.
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By Jerry Knudson Instructor of Journalism
A minor idea, incorporated in "The West and the Desert," proclaims that the realistic way to examine the American West is to begin with the geographical fact of the huge desert which lies at its heart in the inter-mountain West. The East was based on land, water, and trees, Dr. Webb explains. The West had only one of these legs on which to stand. Cities became desert oasis complexes always dependent on receding ground water.
In "The Great Frontier" he moved from a local and national topic to one of international scope. Much like Frederick Jackson Turner—from whom he claims no lineal descendance—he examines the impact over three centuries of available new land masses for festering Europe.
the quotes Bernard DeVoto who said at the University of Colorado in 1948:
AN HONEST PREFACE by Walter Prescott Webb. Houghton Mifflin Company, $3.75.
Walter Prescott Webb is a Harold Ickes among historians. His salty Texan humor relieves his bulldog-like grip on his subjects, which range from "Coca-Cola and Culture" to "How the Republican Party Lost its Future."
"The West is a desert, and we have told ourselves, and the ... world that we have made the desert blossom as the rose. We have told the truth. But we would be wise to remember every moment that roses also blossomed in Mesopotamia and Syria and Tunis and Ur of Chaldees—and they are desert wastes now."
Webb follows his own precepts. His first book, "The Texas Rangers," colorfully described the changes in ways of life necessary when the west-bound settler moved out of the humid tree country into the arid great plains. This thesis was extended in "The Great Plains."
Webb is one of those rare individuals who maintains that history should be readable as well as authoritative. In an essay entitled "For Whom the Historian Tolls," he scores American Heritage magazine for not cultivating professional historians.
The art of writing history is not simply exhibiting a deft hand with footnotes, the author maintains, but catching up the reader in the excitement and sweep of the central idea. Graduate schools are grinding out the historian who "is trained to believe that he can be objective, and that the best way to be objective is to be so colorless as to give the reader something akin to snow blindness."
He points out that out of the 52 issues of the magazine's first five years, only eight lead articles were written by teachers of history, making only 12 per cent of the total.
In 1949 Webb tilted with the corporate windmills of the Coca-Cola company after the University of Texas installed dispensers outside his office and all over campus. "I want the milk concession," he told an administration official. The official demurred. "Well, then, what about Vat 69?" Webb insisted.
His view toward education is highly realistic. In a foreword from "Texas County Histories," Webb maintains that the world itself is the proper university. "We can never have real education, or a self-perpetuating culture, until we get beyond the description and the describer to the things described," he says.
But perhaps the gem of the entire collection is the title piece itself, "An Honest Preface." The author explains, "It had become necessary for me to write a book because the University Administration had made it plain that no further promotion or increase in salary would come without it." Dr. Walter Prescott Webb, now retired, richly deserved his boost in salary and rank.
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"--JUST WANTED YOU TO KNOW YOU'RE UNDER SUSPICION OF HAVING CHEATED ON MY LAST TEST—YOU PASSED IT."