Thursday, April 25, 1963 University Daily Kansan
Page 7
Prof. Nelick Says Students Badly Educated, Overtrained
An associate professor of English said yesterday that today's college students are badly educated and highly over-trained.
Prof. Franklyn Nelick spoke at the final SUA lecture of the year, which by tradition is given by a speaker as though it were the last of his career.
It is, Prof. Nelick said, the process of permitting a person to become who he really is. It is the movement by a person toward what he desires mostly.
"EDUCATION MEANS to draw out or to educe," he said. "It is a natural thing."
About 125 persons were present for the speech.
"Education is an art, and like all arts it has its proper end. No art is a self-enclosed thing."
"BUT THERE IS a place for traaming in the curriculum," Prof. Nelick said. "Not everything can be taught in the classroom.
He offered as the inverse to education, training, which is what he termed "merely progressing."
Citing a parallel between the art of medicine and the art of education, Prof. Nelick said that "medicine as a science deals with the techniques of surgery, but as an art it strives toward the health of the patient."
Prof. Nelick pointed out education
"SO MUCH HAS been done with the technique of education, that we have lost contact with its art." Prof. Nelick said. It is not sufficient merely to train students, but it is necessary to educate them.
also has its techniques. But as an art, he added, it is the perfection of the individual.
"THE LIBERAL ELEMENT is demanded in the world we live in, the emancipation of the person."
Intellectualism has united education. Prof. Nelick said.
Prof. Nelick said a teacher cannot help one become who he really is if that teacher merely passes out information.
"Such a teacher," he said, "hopes to initiate the ways of the intellect and fulfill one aspect of the incursive mind of the student."
"We are too concerned with the brilliance of cerebral display or that we are too pedantic," he said.
Educators have begun to stress an era of specialists. More math, science, chemistry, physics, etc., is needed, "but to insist that specialization is all is ultimately to destroy the democratic process" in the university.
HE POINTED OUT that certain requirements are made upon the student in that process of education.
The student must have candor and a lack of fear by being willing to admit that there is something else he seeks; that he needs to be perfected. It will perfect his intellect and him as a person, Prof. Nelick said.
"A search without an objective is a child's game," Prof. Nelick added. "If the ends of education are divorced from the means, you are merely playing a child's game."
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