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Summer Session Kansau
Tuesday, July 2, 1963
What's the Hurry?
Among the many things which Americans do more of and better than anyone else in the world is hurrying.
This ability to hurry has come in handy. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, it likely was as important a factor as any in stopping Japan and Germany from dominating the world.
WHOLE BOOKS have been written about the advantages of this country's ability and penchant for hurrying. Hurrying has become so popular that it has become the nation's creed—an alter where all pay homage or fall by the wayside.
But we hurry some things which would be better served by contemplation and picking carefully the route to follow.
Education is one of these. Under the heading of an honors program, students are hurrying to finish school.
The emphasis now is on finding an answer to the question, "How quickly can the student finish his B.S. or B.A., start on his Master's and then storm forward to a Ph.D.?"
**HAVE THOSE** in charge asked the question,
"What's the hurry?"
If so, they have come up with a rather narrow answer to an extremely important question.
In reading literature regarding accelerated study programs for exceptional students, the impression is left that educators are concerned with an inanimate entity rather than human beings.
THEY SPEAK of not stifling the academic capabilities of exceptional students by keeping them bound to the less gifted students.
They speak of how it is essential that superintelligent engineers, mathematicians, scientists of all sorts, and teachers be trained so that this country will not fall behind the products of the Little Red School House.
Interminable studies have produced infinitely long lists of specially-trained personnel this country will need by 1970.
MORE DOCTORS are needed, and even industrial workers must learn to operate machines which grow increasingly more complex and sophisticated.
But in all the literature, the feeling is left that they are talking of machines instead of human beings.
Does anyone care about what his religion of education might be doing to the pressure-cooked student?
THIS IS not a figment of an overly-furtive mind. Check the rosters of our mental institutions. The number of teenage and sub-teen children requiring psychiatric help should cause everyone to stop and reflect.
What is the purpose of education? And, regardless of what answer you may have to that question, how is that purpose served by a pressurized study program?
What difference does it make to the national economy whether you earn your doctorate at age 35 or 25?
A LADY I know who has a son about ready to enter college is frightened and concerned for her son. He has earned the high school counselor's label of "Gifted."
This mother is proud. But she also has the curious, out-of-step idea that her son should have a little free time to be able to act like a boy.
Educators themselves are the very people who tell us that students are going through their formative years while being educated. Yet they plow onward with the till of concentrated study set deep.
THERE IS nothing wrong with making a study program sufficiently fast-paced and difficult enough to challenge gifted students.
But there are things which are far more important than producing an elite corps of super intelligentsia.
The waiting lists at mental institutions might grow shorter if the educators were more concerned with "producing" graduates who are socially oriented to the world in which each man must live.
If they had an accelerated program for achieving that they will have found something worth preserving.
— Terry Murphy
Summer Session Kansan
University of Kansas student newspaper 111 Flint Hall
Telephone VIking 3-2700 Extension 711, news room Extension 376, business office
Third Death in Family
Founded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1906, daily Jan. 16, 1912. Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press. Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22, N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates: $3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan., every afternoon during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
PLATTESVILLE, Wis. — (UPI) — Marilyn Butson, 20, this weekend became the third child of Mr. and Mrs. Purl Butson to die accidentally within 18 months.
She died of head injuries suffered Thursday when the horse she was riding bolted and crashed into a car. Her sister, Diane, 8, was killed June 11 in a fall from a hayloft and a brother, Melvin, died in a traffic accident in December, 1961.
THE SONG OF THE LARK, by Willa Cather (Sentry, $2.65).
One of the most beautiful novels of the 20th century is this book of 1915, which depicts the successful career of a girl from the West who becomes a great opera star. The novel appeared before the better-known "My Antonia" and "Death Comes for the Archbishop," but it is not a second-rate work.
Its heroine is Thea Kronborg, and its settings are the beautiful country of the American Southwest and the operatic and concert halls of two continents. Its limitations were recognized by Miss Cather herself; in depicting a woman's steady rise to success she inevitably hits dull spots. Little interfered with Thea Kronborg's climb.
The heroine ultimately makes sacrifices for her fame, of course; this is a theme common to our literature and drama. Miss Cather took the title not from the voice of Thea Kronborg but from the Millet painting which shows the French peasant girl inspired and awakening to the song of the lark.
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THE MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, by Jules Verne (Dolphin, $1.45).
Wild, wonderful fantasy was the forte of Jules Verne. His exploits seem old-fashioned today, in this era of astronauts and mad science fiction and Hollywood movies. But almost a hundred years ago they enthralled readers in the way they were enthralled later by H. G. Wells.
There they spend four years, surviving through incredible scientific inventions. And there they meet that splendid hero-villain from "20,000 Leagues Under the Sea," Captain Nemo, whose secrets finally are bared on the lonely desert island.
"The Mysterious Island" appeared in 1870, and it is a blockbuster of a book, long and exciting. It's about—from now on it's tongue in cheek—five Union soldiers who escape from Richmond in a balloon during the Civil War and are blown 7,000 miles by a hurricane to a wild island they name after Lincoln.
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TRIPLE JEOPARDY; BEFORE MIDNIGHT; THREE FOR THE CHAIR, by Rex Stout (three Bantam volumes, 50 cents each) entertaining mysteries by one of the best practitioners in America. Stout's hero, of course, is the amazing Nero Wolfe, who has been fancying orchids and sending out his man Archie for more than a quarter of a century.
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DOC HOLLIDAY, by John Myers Myers (Bantam, 40 cents)a popular bibliography of the famous gunslinger whose name will forever be associated with those of the Earp brothers. Doc Holliday was the southern aristocrat, who, dying of tuberculosis, fought alongside the Earps at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone.
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THE BURNING COURT, by John Dickson Carr (Bantam, 40 cents) a mystery success of several years ago, now reprinted. And it's one of the best of its kind. Carr's story is of the Black Sabbath and murder.
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THE SUMMER LOVERS, by Hollis Alpert (Bantam, 50 cents)—reprint of a novel by the movie critic of the Saturday Review. The author's demands for perfection in films are not repeated, in fiction, in this somewhat sensational tale of hot love on the beaches.
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SPORTS SHORTS, by Mac Davis (Bantam Pathfinder, 45 cents)a series of short items from the world of sports: Gene Tunney, Don Larsen, Lou Gehrig, Bobby Jones, Sugar Ray Robinson, Annie Oakley, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Jesse Owens and so on.