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Summer Session Kansan Tuesday, June 21, 1966
On being a dropout
(Editor's Note: This is an editorial written by a high school teacher enrolled at KU recently in the Publication Advisers Institute sponsored by the Wall Street Journal's Newspaper Fund and the School of Journalism.)
a nationwide movement is underway to reduce the waste resulting from high school dropout. According to the August 26,1963, issue of U.S. News and World Report, federal funds amounting to a quarter of a million dollars was granted to 48 cities to help them persuade young people to return to school. Dropouts, adolescents who leave high school without a diploma, have been pictured as a growing problem.
However, figures prove there has not been an increase in dropouts in recent years. Quite the contrary, there has been a rise in the number and percentage of people who graduate from high school. The United States Office of Education pointed out that in 1948, 38 per cent of those entering high school dropped out before graduation as compared to 30.4 per cent who quit before graduation in 1958. Then why the concern for a problem that is decreasing?
THE ANSWER COMES from the fact that today, more than ever before, a high school diploma is the key, to the labor and professional working force. Without this key, the young person soon realizes that the unemployment rate is three times higher for dropouts than for his buddies who stuck with it and completed high school.
These dropouts constitute a serious personal and social loss. What causes these youth to drop out of school? What can be done to help them?
Some leave high school for economic reasons; others drop out because of a lack of interest in
school. The needs of these young people could be met through federal and state scholarship programs. Better teaching and improved guidance programs might spark the interest needed for others to remain in school.
OTHER DROPOUTS possess an intellectual level which will not allow them to profit from academic courses taught in the usual way and required for graduation. Moreover, they do not gain much more by enrolling in vocational courses which prepare students for the skilled trades. In order to pass these courses the student must have an average intelligence plus some knowledge of mathematics and science.
Again, grants could be made to schools enabling them to hire qualified teachers who would work with the educable youth both in school and on-the-job training. Employers and labor unions could ease the problem by making more jobs available to these youth. Even in an automated age there are jobs that require little if any technical knowledge.
AS AMERICANS become an urbanized society, these dropouts can only roam the streets and get into trouble. For some boys in their late teens a new CCC program might be more beneficial to them than more formal education.
In America the compulsory schooling law was designed so that every adolescent had the opportunity to get an education. But, it is of little value to require an adolescent to stay in school if he hates it and refuses to learn.
The nation must face this problem and find a solution. Part of this responsibility must be shouldered by other institutions and agencies. The schools cannot do it all.
Earnest McNickle
Business must help
(Editor's Note: This is an editorial written by a high school teacher enrolled at KU recently in the Publication Advisers Institute sponsored by the Wall Street Journal's Newspaper Fund and the School of Journalism.)
In recent years there has been much concern on the part of business in regard to its obligation to society. How much does business owe to society? What is good business citizenship in our culture? Is it practical for those who are in business for profit to give part of their funds for charitable and/or educational purposes?
Should business attend strictly to its profit-getting business? Or, should a business share social responsibilities? What is the duty of corporate executives to the stockholders? Can management rightfully dispose of what belongs to the stockholder without his consent? Theodore Levitt, a Chicago management consultant, says "the business of business is profits." He says further that the responsibilities of business are everyday civility (honesty, good faith, etc.) and to seek material gain.
HOWEVER, THERE is a great deal of evidence to show that these philanthropic pursuits are profitable to business itself, to the cause for which they expend these funds, and to the nation as a whole.
Young people are needed to fill literally thousands of jobs in our complex and changing society. Among these jobs to be filled eventually are those of the business executives and managers who now are pondering the advisability of furnishing funds to help train their successors.
Public sentiment is that corporations have social duties which require time, money, and knowledge.
THE TRADITIONAL corporation's purpose is to conduct business for its maximal profit. The
metrocorporation stands for limitless social obligations to many sectors of society. This philosophy might produce meddling paternalistic donors. The well-tempered (middle of the road) corporations are those which are reacting prudently to all the needs of the enterprise for which they are responsible.
Recently Forbes magazine carried an article entitled "The High Cost of Fatherhood." Is it too expensive to rear and educate a family? It now costs around $2,000 a year for a son or daughter to attend a state university and $4,000 a year at the better-known Ivy League schools. For the future of the offspring, for personal satisfaction, and for society itself, even this is not TOO much to pay. However, some parents just do not have the earning power to pay for this kind of education.
MANY INDUSTRIES and businesses have established foundations, scholarships, assistantships, internships, loans, etc., to help in this gigantic educational task.
As shown in the journalism field, through the Wall Street Journal Newspaper Fund workshops and scholarships for high school teachers are indirectly helping the student. Better qualified teachers produce better qualified graduates in any field of endeavor.
The government has sanctioned contributions and the establishment of educational funds by making them tax deductible for income tax purposes. The public expects both the individual and business to discharge their citizenship duties. There is real heartfelt satisfaction in investing in a better society. Future business and industry will profit by having well-trained, competent people to fill the vacancies as they occur. Are there really any alternatives?
— Vernie Ohler
Summer Session Kansan
For 76 Years, KU's Official Student Newspaper
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A KU alumnus fills the strange—for a Jayhawker—position of second secretary in charge of press and public relations in the Italian embassy in Tokyo, Japan. He is Erno Zamboni of Rome, who studied political science here in 1957-58, holding a Fulbright fellowship and a University scholarship. He joined the Italian foreign service after returning home from Kansas. Tokyo is his first foreign assignment.
Has U.S. post in Tokyo
BOOK REVIEWS
THREE PLAYS, by Ugo Betti (Mermaid Dramabook, $1.95); BUSSY D'AMBOIS, by George Chapman (Mermaid, $1.25); THE BROKEN HEART, by John Ford (Mermaid, $1.25); THE DUCHESS OF MALFI, by John Webster (Mermaid, $1.25); PLATO-NOV, by Anton Chekhov (Mermaid, $1.75)—More evidence of the superior bargains appearing in softcover editions for the discriminating reader (which sounds like a cover blurb, and really isn't). Mermaid, a division of Hill and Wang, has been providing this kind of thing for some time; here are the latest volumes. The primary concern of Ugo Betti, as demonstrated in his three plays here-"The Inquiry." "Goat Island" and "The Gambler"-was justice. An investigation of a family of war refugees, a shepherd and three women on a deserted island, a gambler called for his wife's death during the war—these are the themes of the plays. The Chapman, Ford and Webster volumes provide a new edition of drama of the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras. Teachers especially should find these of value, because of the research, the footnotes, the critical notes and bibliographies. "Platonov" offers in paperback the first major drama of Chekhov but probably the least-known of his works. It reveals the insights that later would mark such plays as his great "Cherry Orchard." This is the first publication of "Platonov" in an unabridged English translation.
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BELZONI, Miss. — (UPI) — Leaders of the "Mississippi freedom march" said they would send a group of voter registration workers today to Philadelphia, Miss., where the last organized civil rights workers to appear were murdered in 1964.
THE STONES OF VENICE, by John Ruskin (Hill and Wang, $1.95)—A classical volume of travel, once read by the many who traveled to the famous city on the sea, and written by one of the greatest of English critics. The book has been edited down considerably for modern readers who do not have the spacious leisure of the Victorian age.
Herb Callendar of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) said the group would be sent by car and it would organize a demonstration in Philadelphia on Wednesday. Philadelphia is located on the extreme western side of the state. The march is now located in the eastern Mississippi delta.
The marchers walked silently to the Belzoni post office this morning in contrast to a sullen confrontation of Negroes and whites Sunday in this little delta town where the civil rights group spent the night.
Freedom group sends team to Mississippi
About 175 persons began singing "freedom" songs outside the post office and began urging Negroes to register to vote with the federal registrars inside.
Dr. Robert Green of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference said Floyd McKissick, the head of $ \mathrm{O} \mathrm{R E} $ , and possibly Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would be in Philadelphia for the demonstration.
During the summer of 1964, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, both white New Yorkers, and James Chaney, a Meridian Miss., Negro, were murdered there while doing civil rights work.
Eighteen persons, including Neshoba County Sheriff Lawrence Rainey, have been indicted under federal laws in connection with the deaths. They are scheduled to go on trial in federal court in Meridian on Sept. 26 on charges of conspiring to deprive the three youths of their rights.
In Belzoni Sunday night, a Negro marcher brandished a stick, uttered an obscenity and invited whites who had gathered at a roadblock thrown up by police to "come on."