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University Daily Kansan Fridav. May 11. 1962
The Insurance Policy
The All Student Council recently heard a proposal to have a group life insurance plan established here. The council listened to the preliminary comments about the plan and had a generally strong affirmative position about it.
The last ASC meeting of the year next Tuesday will find the council voting on a resolution to appoint an independent agent to handle the program for the University. From what was evident last week it appears that the council will maintain its interests and enthusiasm and approve this idea. This would allow the student body president to make the selection of the agent and the program would be on its way to operation by enrollment next Fall.
No official word has been heard about the position of the administration however. The chancellor will hear the details of the idea today and probably come to a preliminary decision.
As with nearly anything which happens here, administrative backing is almost mandatory. Also, any program which has the blessing of the administration is almost sure to be implemented and given all necessary support.
IF THE ADMINISTRATION were to offer support to this group life insurance plan this sanction would mean KU students would be provided with another service of great benefit. The principle advantage of this insurance plan is the cost. Each student who purchased the insurance would pay in the range of $25 to $27 annually in comparison to a cost of $150 to $160 for life insurance on an individual basis. The policy would provide a $10,000 life insurance policy payable regardless of the circumstances of death.
Other advantages such as being guaranteed the right to continue the policy after graduation regardless of health or occupation, being covered
until the September following graduation at the reduced rate, being able to drop from the program at any time without penalty and other benefits make the program sound even more appealing.
If present plans are carried out, the contract for the plan would be signed with the ASC and not the University. This would be another first for KU since at West Point and the University of Rhode Island such contracts are with the schools.
Another important part of the program as it was presented to the ASC was that of having an independent agent representing the students. Such an agent would act as an intermediary between the ASC and the insurance companies which would be interested in having this program here. The biggest advantage of having such an agent is that he could be a great safety device in that he could provide protection for the ASC by making sure that the best company operates the program. If one company eventually shows it is not doing as good a job as another might then an independent agent can step in and have a new company install a better managed program.
THE ASC AND administration are both faced with the decision of instituting this beneficial group life insurance plan here next Fall within the next week. If both were to approve the plan and give the green light to further planning and the eventual establishment of the plan it would mean that KU would be in on the ground floor level of a new and progressive plan which could very likely spread to be of tremendous national scope. It would be an advantage to be able to say that KU was one of the first three universities to have such a program and that it was the first to have it student sanctioned.
Bill Sheldon
Explaining PEACE Editor:
...Letters ...
This letter is written to correct some possibly misleading impressions eminent from the publicity given our new exchange program PEACE (Program for Educational and Cultural Exchange).
First and foremost we are an independent organization working as an associate member of National People-to-People; this National association must be stressed. We do however, anticipate the most cordial relationship with KU P-t-P and have spoken to co-chairman Bill Shaffer and Reuben McCorn-
ack concerning our mutual cooperation. For that matter, we hope for the best possible relationships with all groups similar to our own-on the KU campus as well as nationally.
We do not wish to give the impression of inaugurating "another P-t-P". While it is true that we will work in close cooperation with P-t-P we stress our basic philosophy — independent international experience. Our programs (and we are in the process of officially organizing them) will hopefully provide the opportunity for meaningful and significant experiences.
EATON'S FRIDAY CARTOON
Class Gift
THE POINTS to remember however, are (1) the programs are optional (2) that they imply a choice of a number of possible programs; that is, if the member so desires a program.
Quite naturally the University of Kansas as a public institution cannot sponsor, endorse or in any way be connected with PEACE. We have however, spoken to University officials but only as a point of information. This program, conceived and operated by students is in fact, one of our merits, for I believe undertakings of this type should be spontaneous and eminate from students themselves.
While our program is in its embryonic stages and proceeding rather slowly we continue to sincerely welcome any constructive criticism. We like to think that we can profit from the past experiences of other similar projects.
Executive Director, FEACE Boston, Mass., graduate student
Martin Arlinsky
Daily Hansan
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From the Magazine Rack
Killing Education
With the coming of spring, hysteria creeps across the campus. Tension mounts steadily, and even when it does not erupt in some overt form, it still disturbs the last two months of the college year. Now is the time when the steadily growing psychiatric staffs come into their own...
Among the undergraduates, it is worst for the juniors. Most of the seniors are reconciled; they have by now amassed whatever capital they will possess and know it is too late to make serious changes. The sophomores are frenetically hopeful; despite the facts of the past, they feel they have a chance. The freshmen are still reeling from the shock of self-discovery but are not yet fully aware of what has hit them. The juniors are aware, and therefore the panic that all share to some extent is particularly intense among them.
THOSE GREAT big beautiful A's so avidly sought, those little, miserly C's so often found, were meant for another time and another student body. They were the tools of the teacher in the day when the college was more a disciplinary than an educational institution. The miscellaneous lots of boys and young men who recited their lessons in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American college were indifferently prepared, only occasionally interested, and given to outbursts that took them altogether out of control. The instructor needed grades and fines and other punishments to keep them in hand.
The phenomenon is relatively recent, and it is not everywhere the same. Indeed, there may still be some refuge which is entirely unaffected, where college remains a place of learning, not a ractrack. But year by year the infection spreads, and it seems most virulent in the best institutions and among the best students...
The problem of discipline became less pressing when the college acquired its modern institutionalized form. The grading system nevertheless retained its importance. The curriculum was divided into blocks of courses, each worth a number of points, and an education was defined by the score that stood to the student's credit in the college accounting system. The grade then became critical, because it was evidence of the amount of learning deposited to his credit.
THIS PATTERN has persisted, although few remember what forces brought it into being. Yet no faculty would now maintain that education can be defined by a balance sheet of credits, or that the statistical magic that produces grade scores carried to the second decimal place is a reliable way of evaluating students.
Until recently the system was hardly effective enough to do much harm. A large percentage of the student body could afford to disregard it entirely. After the manner of the lads in Owen Wister's Philosophy 5, they looked down on the grids and occupied themselves in their own ways. And the minority who were interested could study away to their hearts' content without the anxiety of involvement in a mass competition.
All that has now changed. The new students enter after a rigid selective process, they present few disciplinary problems, and they arrive after good and uniform preparation. The constant surveillance of their studies serves no useful function and only interferes with their education.
THE TROUBLE is that the students themselves do not know it. This generation has been so thoroughly harnessed to the treadmill of the examination that it accepts its servitude as a normal if strenuous condition of life. All the external pressures of society encourage that belief. Since education has become a national emergency, it is a patriotic duty to do well in algebra. The student who gets an A in physics will not only advance to a successful career in space but will also defend his country against the Russians. The talented boy has replaced the athlete as the school hero, and the letter worth getting is no longer that on the sweater but that on the report card...
The cruelty of the contest is clearest in courses which establish grades on the basis of a statistical distribution curve. No matter how hard they work, or how able they are, one half of the class will fall below the average. Each student, therefore, finds himself involved in a struggle with his neighbor, whose success will drag him down...
THE LOSSES to the students an- to society are tremendous. The distorted emphasis nullifies much of what the colleges aim to do.
NA
I speak now not of the reconciled mass who somehow make their peace with the system, but of the ablest, among whom the qualities of excellence might be found. These young people secure an admirable training in the techniques of the correct answer. They learn to remember, to be accurate, neat, and cautious. But they are rarely called on to use their ability autonomously or speculatively, to deal with situations in which the answers are not known but must be discovered. . . Writing against the clock, they must always put the cross in the right box and round out the essay with an affirmative conclusion...
That separation of tasks would, of course, make it impossible to administer examinations and award marks for every segment of instruction. So much the better. No other system of higher education subjects its students to the endlessly badgering tests of the American college. The examinations of French and English universities are difficult, but they come where they belong, as the terminus of a stage in education. And they probe not fragments of courses, but the mastery of a whole field of knowledge, however and whenever acquired. These methods cannot be simply transferred to our own situation. But they indicate that we can safely do without the recurrent, meaningless hurdles we now set in the way of our students. We can aim at a mode of evaluation that will judge the whole man as he leaves the campus, not the bits and pieces of him we glimpse as he passes through it.
NOT ALL learning in the college community of the past was confined to the classroom. Often the students taught each other more effectively than the teachers could, gained more from extracurricular activities than from formal classwork. The experience of writing for the paper, or of managing a team, or of singing or playing, and, most of all, the undirected talk that swirled formlessly through the night have a value that cannot be recognized in grades or credits. There will be ever less time for them as the shadow of the examination falls across the college. Boys made rivals by competition will be less ready to help one another, and the immensely variegated activities of the college as it was may dry up.
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I TEASE myself sometimes with daydreams of how we might break out of the present situation. A few institutions have already separated the teaching and the marking functions. That is as it should be, and the result is to clarify the relationship of the teacher to his students. It would be gratifying to appear in a classroom where everyone was on the same side, where there was not one to police and the others to be policed, but all were to work toward the same end. Evidence points to the merits of a divorce between the essentially incompatible tasks of instructor and grader.
(Excerpted from an article in the May 1962 issue of The Atlantic entitled "Are the Colleges Killing Education" by Oscar Handlin, professor of history at Harvard)
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Finally, the whole process thrusts an uncongenial role upon the instructor. His function as a teacher becomes subsidiary to that of the grader; he is judge rather than counselor, impartial arbiter rather than ally of the student. That, too, distorts the meaning of education. It destroys the intimacy of a relationship in which the older person conceives his role as that of helping the younger, in which the younger can turn to the older for aid and advice without fear of being evaluated in the process...
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