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University Daily Kansan
Tuesday, May 7, 1963
State Supports Church
For many, recent developments in several Missouri communities have put the issue of federal aid to non-public schools in a new light.
Catholic school officials had requested that public school bus service be extended to transporting children to Catholic schools. When the Missouri Legislature killed the proposal, Catholic parents started enrolling their children in public schools for next fall.
Public school officials are near panic. Existing classrooms won't hold the increased enrollment. School funds are insufficient to hire the additional teachers who will be required.
Let's hope not. The reasonableness of their present request makes it more expedient, for the present, to provide bus service and avoid the problem of assimilating the Catholic children into the public school systems.
IN SHORT, it appears that the Catholics have the lever they need to get bus transportation for their children.
But what of tomorrow? Supplying bus service today does not remove the Damoclean sword from the hands of the Catholics. If it works this time, you can bet it will be used again.
SO THE QUESTION which should be considered is the basic one: Should non-public schools be supported by tax money?
In the present situation, it may appear that the only question is, what's wrong with providing bus transportation for school children to Catholic schools?
The answer to that question is simple. If you believe it is all right to support non-public schools with tax money, then there is nothing wrong with providing bus service.
BUT THERE IS plenty wrong with using tax money to support schools founded and operated for the express purpose of preserving the tenets
of a religion; not just Catholic schools, any nonpublic school.
In the public school systems, the taxpayer has a right to say how his money shall be spent. He has the right to influence what subject material shall be taught, and the manner of teaching.
It is clear that the schools maintained by various religious sects are not about to give the public any voice in what shall be taught in their schools.
Yet they want the public to help finance a school system conceived and operated for the purpose of preserving specific religious tenets.
WHY SHOULD THE Missouri taxpaying public provide transportation to non-public schools? If they do give in just to avoid accepting the responsibility of educating every child willing to enroll in public schools, the people of Missouri don't believe separation of church and state is important.
The U.S. Supreme Court believes it is important. The justices say it is unconstitutional; you can't teach religion in schools supported by public funds.
THE CATHOLICS ARE not right in exercising this not too subtle pressure. No one asked them to set up special schools to educate their children. They have done it of their own free will and volition.
If they expect to retain complete control over the curriculum in their non-public schools, they cannot expect non-Catholics to support religious teachings.
No one should argue with their right to establish separate schools. But the price of their independence is fiscal responsibility. If the price is too high, they are welcome in the public school systems. It is guaranteed to them by the same court which denies them access to public funds.
- Terry Murphy
Bureaucrats Criticized
Editor:
Firstly, it appears that Miss Koehn does not like conservatives. This is obvious, due to her hatred for bureaucrats. For there is no one more conservative than a bureaucrat. He wants to conserve his job; he wants to conserve his wife's job, who is his secretary; he wants to conserve his ten-year-old son's job, who is his secretary's assistant. In fact, he wants to conserve everything, except the
... Letters . . .
I would like to add two comments of my own concerning bureaucracy to Miss Koehn's comments on that subject, which appeared in "Sound and Fury."
taxpayer's money, and that is where the paradox comes in, he wants to conserve a job which is unproductive (who ever heard of a government making money) in order to force everyone else, who has a productive job, to work for him, that is, making it impossible for anyone else to conserve his own job. This does not seem very cricket, and I am afraid that if we applied this to Kant's categorical imperative we would all be swinging from the trees, and eating raw rabbit for our evening meals.
Secondly, concerning that head-in-the-sand type species of the famous animal "Americananas boobas," the Kansas City Star noted
"Bah! You're Not Trying To Make It Grow"
the other day that Washington, D.C. has the highest crime rate in the country. Evidently someone thought this was a surprising fact. However, the writer merely exposed the fact that he had his head in the sand for a long time. For, ever since the neo-Bismarkians squatted their "rearus firmus" on the Leviathan of the Potomac, they have been raking in enough booty a year to make Black Beard hide in shame.
Arman Matthews Wichita junior
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Foreign Student's Opinion
A foreign student is asked her opinions and experience of the United States; she gives it and someone immediately thinks it a good opportunity to ramble off into some commonplace, claustro
Miss Tecon sounded as if used to making apologies — but that, on behalf of Miss Hadad, was uncalled for and she should have chosen another opportunity.
Miss Hadad was giving her candid opinion based on her personal experience in this country. As no one can enter into her experience, no one can judge her. That Miss Tecson should quote her own experience is irrelevant to Miss Hadad's experience and consequently her opinion. It was obvious that Miss Hadad was speaking for herself not for Miss Tecson or any other foreign students. Therefore one may disagree with her but no one can apologize. It just is not done.
Ayodele Ogundipe Nigeria, special student
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BOOK REVIEWS
paid at Lawrence, Kansas.
OF TIME AND THE RIVER, by Thomas Wolfe (Scribner's Modern Standard Authors, $3.50).
Of Thomas Wolfe's four major works, this is perhaps the most complex and ambitious. Wolfe was able to go on from "Look Homeward, Angel" to refine his theme and style. "Of time and the River" continues the story of Eugene Gant, taking the boy from Altamont, in the mythical state of Catawba, to Boston, New York, Oxford, Paris and the French countryside.
More than the first novel it is a story of Eugene's voyaging, and Wolfe uses classical analogies in his sectional headings. The provincial boy finds himself in the atmosphere of New York and the middle Atlantic states, among people foreign to the simple souls he had known in his boyhood. And the time spent abroad further widens his understanding of life.
He tours the city streets, travels the Hudson, ventures into homes and flats darkened by the tall city buildings. He acquires sophistication as he meets Europeans. On the way home from Europe he meets a woman aboard ship, but this encounter belongs more to the two novels that followed, the two in which Wolfe tried to make a change by turning Eugene Gant into George Webber.
This is a big, beautiful book. University students who have not read Wolfe have ahead of them a deep experience—CMP
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THE NATURAL HOUSE, by Frank Lloyd Wright (Mentor, 75 cents); THE FUTURE OF ARCHITECTURE, by Frank Lloyd Wright (Mentor, 95 cents); THE LIVING CITY, by Frank Lloyd Wright (Mentor, 75 cents).
His impact on American architecture was incalculable, and his philosophy, which was built on Louis Sullivan's "form follows function," permeates these volumes. But neither Wright nor Sullivan took a narrow architectural view of building. Each believed that man himself can be better realized through the buildings he occupies.
For many readers it will be a particular pleasure to find Frank Lloyd Wright in paperback, and these three are beautifully printed volumes with ample illustrations, including Wright's sketches and photographs of some of his most famous buildings.
"The Living City" goes beyond buildings into the area of planning. Here we read Wright's views on overcentralization, the dehumanization of man, the disappearing sovereignty of the individual in the crowded city. In all three books we obtain not only building philosophy but history as well, for here was one of the most articulate geniuses of the 20th century.
POEMS FOR PLEASURE, edited by Herman M. Ward (Hill and Wang, $1.50).
An English professor at Trenton State College has done a service to those readers—and there are many of us—who love the old poems best, and love especially those poems with which they are able to identify themselves emotionally. "Poems for Pleasure" has the poetry many Americans were raised on, right down to "Casey at the Bat" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee."
In this excellent paperback you will find poetry selected by high school students who read poetry in Prof. Ward's living room and selected those poems which "came right off the page to them," without benefit of New Critics telling them the poems were or were not trash.
So you'll find "Half a league, half a league, half a league onward," "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din," "It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea," "I must go down to the sea again," "Home is the sailor, home from the sea," "How do I love thee?." "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day," "I think that I shall never see," "In Flanders' fields the popies grow," "Blessings on thee, little man," "Thou still unravished bride of quietness," "Where ignorant armies clash by night," "In Zauadu did Kubla Khan," and on and on. This book is a gem—CMP
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THE GOOD SOLDIER, by Ford Madox Ford (Vintage, $1.45) Among the literati this novel has a reputation that is almost mystical, yet it is not one of the well-known books of our language. The cover notes that 15 celebrated critics call "The Good Soldier" one of the 15 or 20 greatest novels in English written in this century. One of these is Mark Schorer, who contributes a discerning introduction. Ford started the novel before World War I, and the title is an ironic one. Edward Ashburnham is designated the good soldier out of his imperial service in India. The other central characters are Leonora, wife of Edward, a noble and self-sacrificing woman; Florence, wife of the narrator, and the narrator himself. Ford regarded "The Good Soldier" as his best book, and it is a probing story of human relationships.
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HOWARDS END, by E. M. Forster (Vintage, $1.45)—More than most modern writers, E. M. Forster has excelled in novels that depict clashes of societies and clashes of classes within society. "Howards End" is such a book, not about India like "A Passage to India" or Italy like "A Room with a View" but about England, Lionel Trilling has commented that the book asks the question, "Who shall inherit England?" Howards End is the name of an ancestral home, but it is more than that; it is the symbol of England itself. The plot itself concerns property and a destroyed will and conflicts between heirs. Simple as it sounds, it is a story especially meaningful as one considers the changing English culture of the past two or three generations.
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THE LONG LIGHT OF DAWN, by John Farris (Bantam, 75 cents) sex. sin and sensation, put together to satisfy readers who have outgrown Updike and Styron. It's a big book and it's like oh so many appearing in paperback these days.