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Thursday, February 27,1975
University Dally Kansan
KANSAN
Editorials, columns and letters published on this page reflect only the opinions of the authors.
omnions of the writers.
Legislators wrong
Three Kansas legislators are sticking their noses where they don't belong in deciding curriculum matters for high school graduation.
The legislators have introduced bills that would require students to take courses in the free enterprise system and Kansas history and to comprehensive exam be grading from a Kansas high school.
The first and sillest of the bills was introduced by Rep. Victor Kearns, R-Merriam, Kearns' bill would require high school students to take course on "the essentials and benefits of the free enterprise system."
Kearns said he proposed the bill to help young people have a "greater understanding, insight and application" system that made our country great."
Kearns' bill has no more merit than one requiring a course on the essentials and benefits of the Communist system or a course on the essentials and benefits of the hunting and gathering system. Some historians would take issue with Kearns' jigoistic and bombastic statement that the free enterprise system made this country great.
Kearns claims that students receive a great deal of exposure to other economic systems and he names socialism, communism and totalitarianism as examples. Kearns apparently doesn't know that totalitarianism is a political, not an economic system. And if communism and socialism are taught "a great deal" in Kansas high schools, then the schools have certainly changed considerably in the four years since I graduated from one in Wichita.
Perhaps more meritorious, but still out of place, is a bill introduced in 2014 by R-Hiwatha, that would make Kansas history a graduation requirement.
Jones said her bill was prompted
by a concern that students should know enough about Kansas to sell it to others and so they would stay in college, themselves after graduation.
The third bill, introduced by Sen. T. D. Saar, D-Pittsburgh, would require a statewide comprehensive exam to ensure that students are getting an equal and adequate education across the state.
Saar said the test could be the GED test used to establish high school equivalence dropouts, he said, but the measure effectiveness, he said.
Teaching effectiveness, as displayed by our own Feedback survey, isn't an easily defined or easily measured quality. A student's doesn't necessarily intensive exam doesn't necessarily mean his teachers were at fault.
The proposal for a comprehensive exam is opposed by Warren J. Bell, an official with the State Department of Education. Bell also said the policy of the state board was to allow school districts to have flexibility in designing school curricula. Thus, only American history and government are required for high school graduation.
Although the Legislature has traditionally stayed away from requiring specific programs, the Kansas history and free enterprise course requirements have a good chance of approval by the House Education Committee, according to the committee's chairman.
Tradition should be followed in this area. Legislators have more pressing matters to deal with than pushing their favorite subject matter as vital to a high school education. —Craig Stock
CHARACTER IS WHAT YOU ARE IN THE DARK:
—DWIGHT & MOODY, SERVERS
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
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Susanne Shaw Mel Adams
Conference lacks leaders
BY JAMES J. KILPATRICK
Several hundred of the country's most devoted conservatives came to Washington a few days ago for a Political Action Conference. They full of passion troubled by doubt. They left the same way. It was a productive conference, but not a decisive one.
Rv. JAMES J. KII.PATRICE
The conservatives' dilemma will be understood by every husband or wife who ever has thought seriously of separation or divorce, to stay, or to go? Looking at their relationship with the Republican party, they consistently find the union intolerable. The restless, dissatisfied, unhappy Surely, they say, there must be more to a happy marriage than this.
Yet, precisely because they are conservatives, their political instincts are at war with anything so dramatic as climate change or a servative nature to defend the status quo against precipitous change, to bear the ills we have rather than fly to others that we know not of. Idealism says go; conservatism and pragmatism cry stay.
Alas, we hear other voices also. These are the cool voices that say to the hothad, "Don't, without the most impelling necessity, make a fool of yourself." Third parties are exercises in futility; they tend to attract young amateurs and
Let me state my own position clearly and without equivocation: I waffle. Part of me usually the dominant part of our discussion, but minded conservatives will understand. Politically, we still stand up for Dixie. We thrill to cries of secession. Few things are more appealing than to fight gallantly, even though the cause be lost, for virtue, for principle. When a call is music to our ears.
old prima donna; they exhaust themselves in wordy rhetoric; they invite self-immolation in the flame of their passionate zeal. Conservatives, we are told, can accomplish this within the Republican party than by bumping off on their own.
Most of the participants in last week's conference came to the Hotel Mayflower in the hope they were coming to Fort Sumter. They hungered for a call to political arms; greedy politicians, the publican were palpably painful: Nixon, Watergate, Rockefeller, inflation, recession, deficit spending. The wounds of
November were still bleeding.
Ronald Reagan had only to
arm. He had only to cry
"Follow me!" he ignite a
rebel cause.
It was not to be. Reagan said everything they wanted to hear, except for the one thing they wanted most to hear. Sen. James L. Buckley didn't introduce Reagan as a Lee, or a Jackson, or a Beauregard. Buckley described Reagan as an allusion Rembrand, an allusion left them deflated. Clinton Whittle pro with the Goldwater battle ribbon, argued against secession. Columnist Kevin Phillips warned the participants against the perils of overidealism. In the end, they appointed a committee to make a report.
Perhaps this was all that could have been done, or should have been done. Plainly, the hostile conservative presence wasn't lost on President Ford. In an interview with the Washington Star-News, Ford did his best to defend his own candidacy, acknowledgment that without conservative support, the Republican ticket would have little chance in 1976. He urged the disgruntled right to stay with the party.
For the time being, that may
be the sensible course. I am far from certain. It seems plausible that 122 years ago, Millard Fillmore was saying to his disgruntled friends, stay with the Whigs. But the Whigs were bankrupt, they had comedies and dreaded death of existence. The party no longer was an effective mechanism for electing candidates or promoting ideas. In the elections of 1854, the newborn Republicans elected 108 congressmen and 15 senators. Their party had leadership then. Advocates of a new Conservative party have none today.
(C) 1975 Washington Star Syndicate, Inc.
"THIS IS THE CAPTAIN SPEAKING PLEASE FASTEN YOUR SEATBELTS."
South Africa faces role change
WASHINGTON—I recently went to the home of my journalist colleague Bill Raspberry to view a very moving film about South Africa, "Last Grave at Dimaza."
The movie also caused me to reconsider recent events and conclude that I may have made one misjudgment in what I
My mind was tormented that bad, sleepless night by pictures of black children starving in the desert and gazing at diamonds, uranium and an incredibly high standard of living for the whites who rule it.
How hard it is for any of us to maintain a proper level of indignation about the brutalities that surround us. That movie made me aware of how four years had wiped away the anger that surrounded us, my wife and me when we saw South African racism firsthand.
I had half-nightmares about the African men who had been dragged away from their families, whom they would see only once a year, to do killing labor for pennies in the mines. But the minority that holds power by maintaining one of the most ruthless police states in the world.
wrote after my visit to South Africa.
I said the police state in South Africa was so all-pervasive, the economic and military power of the whites so overwhelming, that even the most shrewdly conceived freedom movement
and was the last great holdout of the European colonial powers. All the evidence suggested that ragtag rebel movements would become fares in the face of Portugal's military power and that Angola and Mozambique would remain Portuguese colo-
By Carl Rowan
Copyright 1975 Field Enterprises, Inc.
by Africans, "coloreds" or Indians would be crushed in its infancy.
My judgment as to the omnipresence of the police state apparatus remains accurate; the force of the Africans' desire to be free, and the ability of other African states (plus Russia and China in some instances) to support a black unrising.
When I left South Africa,
Portugal was a powerful and
cocky ally of white supremacy
in the southern end of Africa
nies as far ahead as anyone dared predict.
But we have just seen in these colonies the same bitter lesson learned by all of us: Indochina: there are stark limitations on the usages of military power against people of other nations to be free of foreign dominance.
The tragedy is that stubborn and foolish Portuguese rulers held out until the guerrilla wars in Portugal's economy and creed. The upheaval that there is now a grave possibility that this once
staunch NATO ally may go Communist.
This rapid collapse of colonialism in Angola and Mozambique jeopardizes, in ways I scarcely thought possible, the continuation of their dominance in Rhodesia and South Africa, the two last bastions of white supremacy on the continent.
Rhodise is in special peril. Some 250,000 whites are trying to escape themselves while relegating 5 million blacks to servitude and the scrublands, even as bloody black uprisings spring up inside the city.
Ian Smith, prime minister of this regime created in defiance of world opinion, now seems to be using a credible freed political prisoners and permitted them to engage in dialogues that might pave the way to majority rule. And even those who have opposed it caused Smith to back off, it must be as clear to him as the certain eventuality of death that white Hondesian can't win a war that Portugal had to abandon.
South Africa's Prime Minister John Vorstor also has shown signs that he realizes an era has arrived in which ob-
duraite apartheid is the route to calamity for 3.5 million whites who have heretofore lorded it over 14 million blacks, 2 million "coloreds" and close to a million Asians.
Vorster wants to withdraw the South African troops that have been defending Rhodesia. He has moved in seeming panic to establish friendly relations with black African countries. He has against passionate publicized gestures toward wiping up apartheid as it applies to black foreigners.
Vorsker know that in 10 years South Africa could be just an enclave of whites, blacks and between a continent of angry blacks and the sea.
Just as peaceful co-existence with the Russians was considered a traitorous phrase 15 years ago but is totally accepted today, the South Africans have begun to think of accepting what has been unthinkable: A meaningful role in government by black Africans, which it must have to lead to black rule.
This won't happen soon, but I'm ready to conceed that my talk of 50 years might have been a trifle pessimistic.
Readers respond
To the Editor:
The letters to the editor policy of the Kansas imparts that untyped letters will not be accepted for publication. If this is true, I'd like to protest that policy because it denies the right of public expression of opinion to the majority of
students who don't happen to have typewriters.
Letters shouldn't have to be typed
You might reply that most people can at least borrow a typewriter if they need one, but not everyone that leave those people who don't know how to type? From my own acquaintances, I'd
Letters Policy
estimate that about 75 per cent of all KU students don't have typewriters and that about 20 per cent don't know how to type.
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 space limitations and the editor's judgment. Students must provide their name, year in school and home town; faculty and staff must provide their name and position; others must provide their name and address.
I doubt that the Kansan staff is deliberately trying to stifle access to their medium. Maybe they save themselves a little work. Maybe they really don't know that not everyone has a laptop. Maybe we don't really have submit typewritten letters.
Maybe they should change their letter policy so students can get curriculum clique can have free access to "their" newspaper.
Roch Thornton Winfield junior
Editor's note—Kansan letters policy requests that letters to the editor be typewritten because handwriting that is too sloppy can cause errors in the preparation of the letter for printing. However,
To the Editor:
Semantics
letters are never refused because they are handwritten.
The issue is still, to my way of thinking, women's rights. If men gave birth and had primary responsibility for childraising, would abortion even be an issue? I think not. You men ask yourselves, you pregnant with an unwanted, unplanned for child? Would I choose to raise it in an atmosphere of resentment, or would I choose to have an
To THE EMPHASIS:
if anti-abortion vs. anti-
abortion issue has degenerated
in pure semantics. My opinion
is, that if anti-abortionists are
allowed to legislate that the fetus has a legal right to life from the moment of conception,
then it will be a short step to
ensure that birth control will be
attacked on these grounds.
abortion? What if I didn't have a choice?"
So please cut the crap about when life begins. It's not the issue.
I might add that adoption isn't the easy alternative that it is touted as. After carrying a child on a walk, he faces emotional tie to the child that isn't easily broken by the mother. Most people aren't strong enough to put their unrelated children up for adoption.
Jana Trent Lawrence Senior
Shape up
To the Editor:
I find it very disgusting that the people who eat in the first floor hallway of Wesco Hall don't clean up after themselves. To you jerks: there are trash nuclei available. Make an effort.
Thomas S. McClenaghan Lawrence Senior