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University Daily Kansan Thursday, Jan. 8, 1959
Education's Challenge
The challenge before education today is to search out the superior and talented students and offer them specially designed programs.
There is a growing awareness among professional educators that the development of special programs for the talented is not only important, but crucial within the framework of our American educational system. Such programs are related to the three primary objectives of American education—the personal, social and intellectual development of the individual student. They are particularly geared to meet immediate and urgent problems of quality and excellence in the face of quantity which confronts our schools and universities today.
"A misconception of a primary democratic sympathy for the underdog and distrust of 'aris-toeratic' superiorities has led to the expenditure of nine times as much money on programs for the subnormal as on programs for the superior," says a newsletter of the Inter-University Committee on the Superior Student.
Quoting the Rockefeller Brothers Report on Education, "The Pursuit of Excellence," the newsletter says "it has not always been easy for Americans to think clearly about excellence.
"At the heart of the matter is a seeming paradox in democracy as we know it. On the one hand, ours is the form of society which says, 'Let the best man win,' and rewards winners regardless of origin. On the other, it is the form of society which gives those who do not come out
on top the widest Latitude in rewriting the rules of the contest.
"But when the rewriting of the rules is designed to banish excellence, to rule out distinguished attainment, to inhibit spirited individuals, then all who have a stake in the continued vitality of democracy must protect."
Every democracy must encourage high individual performance. If it does not, it closes itself off from the mainsprings of its talent and imagination, and the traditional democratic invitation to the individual to realize his full potentialities becomes meaningless.
The 18th century philosophers who made equality a central term in our political vocabulary never meant to imply that men are equal in all respects. Men should, as the phrase goes, be equal before the law.
But men are unequal in their native capacities and their motivations, and, therefore, in their attainments.
In the conspicuously larger classes which have developed in the past few years, the able student is often deprived of intellectual zest. Enrollment in honors courses, in the institutions which have them, is continuing to grow because the intellectually sensitive student wishes to escape from the dated lecture course.
The goal of honors study is the development of the student's capacities for research, written and oral expression, and independent thought. It is almost the ideal method for those who "would gladly learn and gladly teach."
—Pat Swanson
Only Human
Most of the time we think of the Russians as cruel; heartless people willing to turn in to the party their own wife or father for misconduct.
However, reading the stories on Mikoyan, Soviet deputy premier, now visiting this country, a very different picture is painted.
Stories and pictures appearing in Monday's newspapers across our country showed him taking a walk in Washington, D.C. The pictures of Mikoyan watching a squirrel in a tree and his curiosity in the operation of a doughnut machine show his very human qualities.
Tuesday Mikoyan went shopping for his own groceries. This does not make him seem so high and mighty.
He certainly is not trying to impress the American public as a superior being.
This could be part of a propaganda stunt to make him "well loved" by all Americans. However, it is more probably a view of what Mikoyan really is—a person interested in nature and
and the smaller things in life such as the squirrels, a person fascinated by the machine age we live in, a person not so much different from many Americans.
His education, language, traditional background and political background may be different from that of a citizen of the United States. His dress and mannerisms may be of a different style. But with all this we can not forget that he is a human being. He may be a Russian but he still is a man.
He has hates, but he has loves. He may be blase on some matters but he is intensely interested in others.
He has a strong feeling of nationalism, but so do we. He will be stubborn and hold out for his country's demands, but so do we. We can not always agree with what he thinks and what he demands but we must remember that he is a man.
He is one man but he represents most othe Russian. In many respects he is just like us.
Martha Croiser
LITTLE MAN ON CAMPUS By Dick Bibler
The 86th Congress kicked off its "new era" session yesterday. We hope the report is correct and that it is not a "new error" session.
UNI PRITT Dailu transan
Short Ones
University of Kansas student newspaper
Founded 1889, became bweekelow, 1904,
and closed in 2015.
A Wichita man is indignant because he couldn't get treatment for a dog bite New Year's Eve. Well, a lot of us spent New Year's Day looking for a hair of that same dog.
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NEWS DEPARTMENT
Malcolm Applegate ... Managing Editor
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Bill Irvine Business Manager
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
Al Jones  Editorial Editor
From the Magazine Rack-
Keep It Equal
By Bruno Bettleheim
First there was Little Rock; then came Sputnik. First there was excitement about equal schooling for all children irrespective of race, and then about the need for special schooling for the gifted child
The connection between integration in the schools and education for the gifted is indeed intricate.
School integration, as adjudged by the Supreme Court, is required because in states where the schools are segregated the educational facilities for Negro children are inadequate.
All too often the same people who insist that all men are equal claim just as heatedly that some are more equal—and hence demand a different type of schooling for the gifted.
The public demand for better provision for the gifted child is based on exactly the same premise—that educational facilities are inadequate.
The more democratic nature of our government and social system came about because, in theory, all children are subject to identical educational experiences during their first twelve years in school, while the radical separation of those who are to benefit from higher education takes place only at about when the personality is nearly fully formed.
It is usually only in high school that the young adult can free himself sufficiently from the handicaps his home background may contain and to develop mainly in terms of his own native talents.
If differentiation is begun earlier, instead of the school's equalizing differences in home background it only adds to them the agony of intellectual differences.
Besides the wish to beat Russia in the cold war race for superior technology, there is a general concern that our curricula do not do justice to the gifted, that they are thwarted in their growth by learning situations designed for the average child. By giving premiums to the gifted child because of his achievement, he may be encouraged to overstrain his abilities in order to remain at the top.
Might we not, for survival, need new ideas about how to organize a world-wide society, new ideas to fire the imagination rather than technicians or physicists? And since ideas mature slowly, maybe what we need is not a speeding up but a slowing down of our all-too-rapid pace.
We are told we need more scientists or more engineers to "survive" and therefore we must swiftly move ahead those who have talents in such fields.
Because it is so difficult to agree on what is the "best" education for the child, the argument is often switched to what is supposedly best for society.
—Excerpts from Sputnik and Segregation, Commentary, October, 1958.