'Someday School' teaches 'how to learn'
Education correction Chittenden's 'thing'
by JOHN B. HALL Kansan Writer
LeRoy Chittenden is no ordinary sounding name, But then neither is LeRoy Chittenden an ordinary person.
He belongs to the new generation; the hip culture; the what's happening environment. He has long hair and he has a beard. He wears dirty blue jeans, t-shirts and sneakers. He speaks good of pot and bad of society. His philosophy is "do your own thing."
LeRoy Chittenden is different, different even from his peers because he advocates doing your own thing and then he does it.
LeRoy's thing is education. "I really dig it."
After four years of college preparation, LeRoy envisioned philosophy might be his bag. He
didn't realize that man had invented such a stagnate, dead method of looking at living. He "copped" out.
He returned to school to be certified as a teacher. He began teaching in high schools. It was a challenge. He was charged. He walked away disillusioned.
Then the revelation. The LeRoy Chittenden experience. "The teacher's role in education is helping the students learn how to learn, not what to learn." This is his thing now.
Reasoning that a complete abortion of the American education baby was impossible, LeRoy sought to alter its growth another way.
Someday School day care center happened. Hoping to start with young children not yet
clamped in the mold, LeRoy and his assistants began operation in the basement of the Centenary United Methodist Church.
"Kids have such fantastic, magnetic minds. Where is it that they become demagnitized?" he said.
"Why is it that children gradually become so fact oriented they quit wondering?"
Probably because teachers tell us what to learn. The facts they designate must be more important then anything else. Besides, if we don't memorize this stuff we fall victim to the "grade ax."
"By high school, students are dependent on their teachers to tell them where it's at," he said.
"Someday School" is happening because LeRoy Chittendon wants his students to always retain their youthful minds. There is no reason why children have to forfeit imagination or curiosity in exchange for increased age. There are many reasons why they should not.
Other people are aware of the American educational blunder. They have children. They send them to "Someday School."
"Kids have the right to have fun," says LeRoy. They also have the right to grow. "Someday School" stresses three areas of development. They study natural things—the world around them. Why is the sky? Who drives the
street sweeper? They invent vocabulary.
"They need to talk about what they see, don't they?" he said.
LeRoy Chittenden is restless. He wants to work with more than nursery age children. Next year he plans to start working with first graders. The year after he may start another school somewhere.
"Someday School" will grow because it is groovin' on an idea, an educational conception: not just LeRoy. LeRoy Chittenden is a revolutionary. There are educational rebels all across America searching for the same dream LeRoy has. He doesn't stand alone —just tall.
Religious attitudes revealed by survey
By LOUIS CASSELS UPI Religion Writer
God isn't dead on college campuses. But the church, as an institution, enjoys very little favor among students.
That is the finding of James and Robert Foley, two enterprising undergraduates who polled 3,000 students at 100 colleges on their attitudes toward everything from religion to race relations and the draft.
In reply to the question, "Do you believe in God or a supreme being?" 73 per cent answered yes, 19 per cent said no, and 8 per cent registered indecision.
Responses to other questions indicated that most students draw a sharp distinction between believing in God as a necessary hypothesis to explain the existence and order of the universe, and being actively "religious."
Being religious was generally understood to mean, or at least to include, going to church. In
Beethoven lives in spirit of works after 200 years
Ludwig van Beethoven, born in 1770 in Bonn, Germany, is still very much alive in 1970 all over the world.
At 12 the child prodigy Beethoven played the organ in the court orchestra in Bonn, Germany. At 13 his first work appeared in print.
The prominence Beethoven gained through his talents secured him the recognition of the greatest talents of his time, including Haydn and Mozart.
In 1810 Beethoven became deaf while working on his seventh symphony. Conductors, including Josef Crips, conductor of the Buffalo Philharmonic orchestra, have noticed problems because of his deafness in rythms and tempo in the seventh symphony.
In 1808 he received an invitation to become the music director of Kassel. In response to this, three of Beethoven's strongest patrons, Archduke Rudolf of Austria, Prince Josef Max Lobkowitz and Prince Ferdinand Kinsky, offered Beethoven a yearly stipend to stay in Vienna. This enabled him to devote almost all of his time to composition.
Yet, Beethoven continued composing and wrote two more symphonies. His ninth symphony is considered his greatest work.
Beethoven died in Vienna on March 26, 1827. Though, Crips said, "the finale does not take place here on earth."
18 KANSAN Apr. 15 1970
reply to the question, "Have you been to church services of any kind in the last seven days?" only 36 per cent answered yes, and 64 per cent said no. Many of the latter indicated they never went to church.
In volunteered comments and in response to follow-up questions, the non-churchgoers said that traditional patterns of corporate worship strike them as being dull and pointless.
Many said they'd be attracted to the church if they felt that its primary purpose was serving mankind. But they made clear it is here-and-now service, combatting social ills, that they want to see the church involved in, not preparing people for a future life.
Although most of the students said they believed in a life hereafter, relatively few seemed to think it would involve rewards or punishments for things done or left undone in this life.
The Foley findings are corroborated, in the main, by the observations of college chaplains and religion teachers.
The Rev, Dr. Robert McAfee Brown, professor of religion at Stanford, says he encounters "a remarkable degree of what I must call religious commitment on the campus," even among students who do not profess belief in any conventional concept of God.
"Jesus is 'in' with students," Dr. Brown says, because He met the fundamental campus test of sincerity by "putting His body where His words were."