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University Daily Kansan Monday, March 22,1965
Aim of Education
College students have been dissected, grouped, graphed and analyzed ever since statistical surveys were discovered. We have been labeled everything from the "beat" generation to the reincarnated "lost" generation. We are damned because we demonstrate and are concerned, pitied because of the college pressure for success and congratulated for the same reasons we are damned.
The national limelight, once focused on the eastern "name" schools, has now diffused to include almost all colleges. KU got its share of the attention last week with the demonstrations. Berkeley has been in the limelight for some time with its many student protests.
Adults have always viewed colleges as the repository of the hope and anxiety of the future. At one and the same time, they have chided us because we are children and pitied us because we are old before our time. But they have realized, despite all our faults, imaginary or real, that we are those who will build on a world they have helped to develop. The "beats" protest that they had nothing to do with the present world. The college image of the girl with the flip hair-do is assumed to have the attitude that her hair-do suggests.
THE STATISTICIANS graph how we feel about everything from God to the war in Viet Nam. They picture us as harriedly poring over books in the wee hours of the morning and as discharging our frustrations and tensions by dancing the "frog" at the nearest discotheque.
As the images multiply, many lose sight of the real purpose of the University . . . the education of the mind. The public becomes so immersed in our frustrations, our causes and our latest fads that they forget our function here. The classical conception of education was limited to the study of the classical subjects, available only to the elite.
In a drastic swing, American education shifted to the theory that everyone should be educated to the maximum of his ability. As a result of Sputnik, increased emphasis was placed on technological study. The emerging theory is to educate and develop the mind, not the whole person.
And so the purpose of education, and American education in particular, still remains an enigma. Alfred North Whitehead, professor at Harvard University, says:
"The justification for a university is that it preserves the connection between knowledge and the zest of life, by uniting the young and the old in the imaginative consideration of learning. The university imparts information, but it imparts it imaginatively. . . . A university which fails in this respect has no reason for existence. . . A fact is no longer a bare fact: it is invested with all its possibilities. It is no longer a burden on the memory: it is energizing as the poet of our dreams, and as the architect of our purposes."
IT BECOMES A STIMULATING link between the world of the Middle Ages and the world of the atom. It regenerates the ideas of the ancients for use in the ages to come. The causes, the protests, the frustrations are all a part of the education. The mind revolts at the idea of sterilizing the facts, the ideas to the point where they are no longer useful. The protests, if they are valid, are merely a way of utilizing the concepts learned in a classroom, in a discussion. There is a real and present danger that the cause is not valid, that is merely a cause without a purpose. This is when demonstrations become meaningless.
The merit of a cause, a bull session, a meditative walk has to be judged on the basis of how it serves the individual. A university is not an aggregate personality of crazes and causes, it is 11,000 minds seeking the answer of truth.
— Leta Roth
NATO Celebrates Anniversary
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization will have completed its 15th year next month.
With five years left before the treaty is due for renegotiation it is beginning to show signs of weakness. There is a chance the NATO alliance will be abandoned when the question of renegotiation comes up in 1969.
If it is abandoned, it will simply be because the world has outgrown the original provisions. The NATO treaty was conceived and signed in a period that bears little resemblance to the world today.
WORLD WAR II had left Europe weak and defenseless. The Soviet power was taking over in all of the Eastern European states where its troops still remained, and the threat to Western Europe seemed real and immediate.
The United States for the first time in its history came face to face with the fact that its future well-being was closely tied-up with the security of governments other than its own. If Europe were to fall to the Communists, it would be left without allies, in an almost undefensible position.
Europe needed the protection of
the United States, the United States found it in its own best interest to guarantee Europe that defense.
The North Atlantic Treaty, signed in April, 1949, was a simple multilateral defense treaty. The 12 signatory powers promised to supply military personnel and equipment to a NATO force which would be under the direction of a central headquarters and a supreme commander.
THE ORIGINAL members included the United States and Canada in the Western Hemisphere; Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Iceland, Norway, Denmark, Portugal, and Italy in Europe. Greece, Turkey and Germany joined later.
However, even in 1949, when the need for such an alliance seemed almost overwhelming, there were many doubts as to the advisability of the NATO organization.
Those who feared the Soviet power most were not absolutely convinced this was the way to deal with the threat. They were concerned about the possibility of such a Western alliance splitting Europe into Eastern and Western Blocks that could never be reconfiled. After the war there was a
genuine hope in Europe that the continent could regain at least the degree of unity it had maintained throughout history. Sovereign nations with changing shades of alliance, they felt, should not be replaced by two distinct power blocks.
European leaders found it expedient to keep Europe, especially Germany, separated; but the European people longed for reunification.
THERE WAS also a fear in Europe that the NATO alliance would bring on the war it was formed to prevent. It was inevitable that the Russians denounce the alliance as aggression aimed as starting a third world war. With the Russian protests against having American nuclear power established almost on their borders, Europeans thought there might be a chance the Soviet power would try to push even further into Europe, or attempt to eliminate the American power from Europe altogether.
Dailij Hänsan
111 Flint Hall
111 Flint Hall UNiversity 4-3648, newsroom UNiversity 4-3198, business office
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There was also some bitterness over the fact that the NATO treaty called for an established military force to which every nation had to contribute. In 1949, rearmament in Europe could only be viewed as an extremely costly operation for nations which needed everything they had to recover from the war.
Leta Roth and Gary Noland Co-Editorial Editors
NEWS DEPARTMENT
Don Black ... Managing Editor
Bobbie Bartelt, Clare Casey, Marshall Caskey, Fred Frailey, Assistant
Managing Editors; Judy Farrell, City Editor; Karen Lambert, Feature-
Society Editor; Glen Phillips, Sports Editor; Janet Chartier, Telegraph
Editor; Harry Krause, Picture Editor.
EDITORIAL DEPARTMENT
BUSINESS DEPARTMENT
Tom Fisher Business Manager
Nancy Holland, Advertising Manager; Ed Vaughn, National Advertising Manager; Dale Reinecker, Classified Advertising Manager; Russ Calkins,
Merchandising Manager; Bob Monk, Promotion Manager; Gary Grazda,
Circulation Manager.
And there were those who were convinced that the NATO treaty was completely unnecessary. The most well-organized group with this opinion was the Bevanite wing of the British Labor Party. It asserted that the rearmarm program was the result of a superficial analysis of the international situation, that the world was not immediately endangered by Russia, that the Russians were still too weak from the wounds inflicted by the war to start another; that the peoples of both Eastern and Western Europe were primarily concerned with recuperation; and that by putting first emphasis on arms the Americans would irritate tensions and divert the West from long-time basic reforms which alone could win the ultimate victory over Communism.
—Jackie Helstrom
Out Of The Cocoon
Education Locked In Pressure Cooker
Does education reach its highest level of perfection when students scramble constantly for higher test scores and better grades? Does academic excellence require that students be subjected to the kinds of pressure now found in the "most highly selective" colleges? Will the students who survive these pressures and who conform to the demands of their professors become the adults who will lead the nation and advance the culture?
For a time this was all to the good, particularly in colleges that previously had asked too little of students. But, as the trend continued, the competitive pressures became overwhelming for many. Students began to rebel. Cheating increased (a recent study of ninety-nine campuses reports that half the students questioned admitted to having engaged in some form of academic dishonesty).
In this mad scramble for the symbols of learning, has something been lost from the academic world? Have students lost the opportunity for quiet contemplation? Are they being denied the time for reading good books that are not assigned by a professor-for leisurely discussion of the things that matter most, whether or not they fit neatly into a required course of study? Has "higher standards" come to mean better grades and test scores rather than greater depth of understanding?
Perhaps the answer to all these questions is "yes." Perhaps the widespread complaints from students come only from those who should not have entered college in the first place or who chose the wrong college. Perhaps the frequent reports of increased neurosis among students reflect only better diagnosis and a greater willingness of the young people of this generation to seek psychological help when they need it. Perhaps the higher suicide rates among students are misleading. Perhaps the increased technical knowledge makes a heavier load essential. But there is enough room for uncertainty to justify a close examination.
Not long ago we shared the view of many educators that college standards were too low—that students were devoting too little energy to intellectual endeavor. When colleges found it difficult to attract enough students to fill their dormitories and classrooms they were understandably reluctant to risk further attrition by raising standards. But a dramatic change has occurred within the past decade. The shortage of space resulting from the vast increase in numbers of students desiring college education has made it easy for colleges to push standards steadily upward. Professors have responded by making heavier assignments and grading more ruthlessly. It has become harder to get into college and harder to survive after being admitted.
We would welcome the views of our readers-students, parents, and professors. We shall print as many letters as our space permits and, if the volume of mail is large, we shall offer a summary of responses.
— Reprinted from Saturday Review
BOOK REVIEWS
DIVINE GRACE AND MAN, by Peter Fransen (Mentor, 75 cents). The author is professor of theology at the Society of Jesus Philosophical and Theological College in Belgium and formerly taught at Fordham. The book is based on lectures given in several cities before lay audiences. Fransen is trying in this work to treat the evangelical concept of God by eliminating what he views as the metaphysical vocabulary which clouds many discussions, and he uses modern psychology to treat divine grace in the individual.