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Friday, January 16, 1987 / University Daily Kansan
Opinions
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Investment in the future
You've got to spend money to make money.
It's an expression that has been proven in business time and time again, but it also goes for higher education. The answer to the state's economic woes is not to cut off all investment in the future, but to work harder to make those investments pay.
In the last session of the Kansas Legislature, much discussion was focused on attempting to boost the economy by attracting industry and thinking of ways to keep the state's brightest students from looking at out-of-state schools for their educations. Now all of that discussion seems to have been forgotten.
The 3.8 percent budget reduction that Gov. Mike Hayden ordered for all state institutions cost the University
of Kansas $3.16 million at a time when its budget already was stretched thin.
Less money available for salaries will cut the number as well as the quality of the instructors and teaching assistants hired. Thus, the quality of education cannot help but decrease as will the quality of students attracted.
State officials must realize that there can be no sustained economic growth without a strong education system. A thriving university system brings intelligent students, who are more likely to take a first job in the state, and valuable information from research done at the schools.
So while a continued investment in education may not help ease the state's deficit now, it may be the best way to eventually erase the threat of a deficit.
Tuition not the answer
The Bureau of Indian Affairs has announced recently that the quality of education at many of its institutions, including Haskell Indian Junior College, is "alarmingly substandard," and the bureau wants to change that. As part of its plan, the bureau is proposing an $850 annual tuition fee which, if approved by Congress, would go into effect in October.
At this time, Haskell does not charge its students tuition.
While the idea of improving the quality of education is a noble one, the execution of it may do more harm than good for the students.
The basic idea behind having free tuition was to encourage the Indian students to pursue some type of higher education. Yet, last fall, Haskell's enrollment was 798, about 100 fewer than the previous year. The annual dropout rate is about 11 percent. Also, the majority of students who attend Haskell come from families that are "economically deprived," said Gerald Gipp, president of Haskell.
Considering there is no tuition and only minimal costs for room, board and books, statistics like these are alarming. Adding a tuition fee would only worsen the existing problems. Yes, the quality of education needs to be improved, but imposing a tuition fee higher than what the University of Kansas charges in state students on a student body in which a majority are financially strapped is outrageous.
A spokesman for the BIA said he thought students would be more committed to school if they had to invest money in it. However, how can it be determined whether students are more committed if they aren't financially able to attend?
Scholarships and financial aid programs will be available. Yet, the amount of money for these programs is limited, and the students also must meet certain academic requirements to be eligible for these programs.
A solution to improve their education is needed. However, that solution is not to impose a tuition.
A lesson in democracy
U. S. students could learn a lesson by looking at their peers to the east.
In the past month, Chinese students have held demonstrations in favor of democracy in 11 cities.
Guan Weiyan and Fang Lizhi, president and vice president of China Science and Technology University in Hefei were fired Monday and Wang Ruowang, a writer, was expelled from the Communist Party yesterday. Xiaoping
At first the Chinese government simply ignored the demonstrations. The protests continued, and Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping has been forced to acknowledge the students and has singled out three people as instigators of the student movement.
also said the students' actions were a very big mistake.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
The Chinese students are trying to make their future better by getting more democracy and Western influence in China.
We take democracy for granted because it always has been here and we probably will never have to fight for it, but this society is not perfect. The present generation of students should be thinking also of its future and should take positive steps to assure that it is the best it can be.
The Chinese students should be congratulated for looking ahead and trying to improve their lives. American students should do the same.
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Parents see homeschooling as option
The crisis in the nation's public education system has manifested itself in many ways, such as teachers' strikes, illiterate students graduating and schools more
PAUL CAMPBELL Columnist
resembling war zones than academic institutions. Eight years ago this Sunday, John Singer was killed over the way he dealt with this crisis.
their land.
A Mormon, Singer and his wife, Vickie, thought that the atmosphere of the public schools in Utah encouraged immoral behavior. He built a one-room schoolhouse on his land where they could teach children themselves.
State authorities intervened challenging the homeschooling. The Singer family would not compromise on its principles. Eventually, they were charged with neglect and, when they did not appear at their hearing, cited with contempt of court. Fearing arrest and harassment, they did not leave
On that Jan. 18, lawmen swept down on Singer as he was outside on his property. Panicking, he waved the Colt pistol that was in his jacket. An officer responded with a shotgun blast that pierced the Utah winter. John Singer fell dead in the snow.
This regrettable incident dramatizes the plight of parents who seek alternatives to public education systems. Most Americans accept government providing for children's education as readily driving on the right side of the street. That there are alternatives to public education does not occur to most parents, who are ultimately responsible for their children. This is the real crisis.
One problem with public education is a failure to teach what Secretary of Education William J. Bennett calls "basic moral literacy" in the public schools. This has driven some parents to seek alternatives such as homeschooling.
A government official, especially a Reagan appointee, who refers to a problem with morality is automatically accused of wanting to return to the Dark Ages. The cry
is to keep the teaching of morality out of the schools.
While the child will develop some of his precepts from his home, much of these will be altered by what is learned in school. A child taught nothing but basic school, where he will spend a good portion of his early years, will think that there are no values.
To escape what some see as a moral vacuum, some people are turning to home学校的, but they are not doing this without considerable flak from the established state institutions.
Michael Kolesnick, a teacher and a school board member in Vermont, decided that he wanted to have his younger son instructed at home. What was originally a state oversight to ensure an "equivalent" education became overbearing interference in the form of administrative fiats and increasing red tape.
The burdening by the state was lifted only after Kolesnick and other homeschoolers argued the advantages of homeschoiling to the Vermont Legislature. Homeschooling provides an individualized curriculum based solely on the needs of the child instilled by those with the best interest of the child in mind, the parents.
During the debate before the Legislature, a teacher's union official said the homeschooleers sought the destruction of public education. Their underlying assumption was that only the state is responsible for a child's education. With proper social support, moral relativism and inability to install a sense of moral literacy, this is a very dangerous pretense.
Homeschooling is a viable alternative for students with parents who have the resources. Homeschoolers do not wish to destroy the public education system, but they possess a healthy suspicion system that is subject to the political whims of whomever is in power.
Distributed by King Features Syndicate
While there are many good public schools with dedicated instructors, enough mediocre exists for some parents to seek alternatives. Automatic concessions to the state on education are not signs of liberty in a society that prides itself on the rights of the individual.
Returning frozen assets a form of ransom
While the arms-for-hostages deal is being investigated, the ransom for the last batch of American hostages held by Iran is under discussion: Americans and Iranians have been
PAUL GREENBERG
Columnist
meeting in The Hague to arrange the return of Iranian assets frozen in this country when the American Embassy at Teheran was seized.
This $507.7 million is part of the ransom Jimmy Carter agreed to pay for the hostages' release, while insisting it wasn't ransom. Now the Reagan administration says there's no connection between the release of these funds and the release of American hostages now held in Lebanon. The speaker of the Iranian parliament knows better, and so does anybody else with eyes to see. Turns out that the Carter and Reagan administrations aren't so different after all.
this world or the next the United States of America should be turning these funds over to the Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran. Are these assets being released in grateful recognition of Iran's having gone from seizing hostages itself to seizing hostages by proxy in Lebanon? Is that sort of improvement really worth half a billion dollars?
No one seems to be asking why in
Is the money being paid because the Carter administration agreed to turn it over in exchange for the American hostages held 444 days in Iran? No agreement made under duress need be honored; on the contrary, there is a moral obligation on the part of civilized societies to see that criminals pay for their crimes. If a person has an offence message could be sent to future kidnappers than the news that these assets are "not" being returned?
This money ought to go to the victims of the Ayatollah's kidnappers; to the hostages and their families; to the survivors of American servicemen killed in the heroic but bungled effort to free the hostages; to the government of the United States in partial payment for the seizure of its embassy and the
kidnapping of its employees.
The government of Iran should be paying punitive damages; instead it is being paid ransom. Washington seems to have forgotten that punishment, not reward, acts as a deterrent to crime. The example of these assets being returned—without apology, without reparation to the victims, with a semblance of justice—is not likely to deter kidnappings in the future.
The surest result of paying off the kidnappers will be to whet their appetite for more payments, which means more hostages may be taken. For Teheran, kidnapping has become a method of securing foreign exchange.
Iran's chief negotiator in these unseemly talks has contributed a new example of chutzap, a term that might be defined losslessly as gall to the "n'th degree. The classic example of chutzap (a term that made its way into English from Hebrew via Yiddish) was the case of Moshe Kahn, who found guilty of murdering his parents, pleads for mercy because he is an orphan. Assodallah Nouri, Iran's chief delegate to these talks,
rates at least an honorable mention in the chutzpah department solely on the basis of his indignant reaction to Washington's hesitation to turn over these funds. "The government of the United States," he complains, "has so far not shown its good faith." Unless the kidnappers get their money, they're threatening to take this country to the World Court. Considering the membership and disposition of that body, it might give a sympathetic hearing to these much aggrieved kidnappers.
This latest round of negotiations with the Iranians is out in the open but it is just as ill-considered as last year's secret ones with Iranian moderates, which turned out to be neither (a) secret nor (b) talks with moderates—or at least with any Iranians willing to up to that description, which would be the equivalent of a death wish.
These more open negotiations sound like something out of Lewis Carroll rather than international law. Yet distinguished diplomats and sober tribunals manage to keep a straight face when discussing how much in all fairness the victimized should hand over to the victimizers.
BLOOM COUNTY
by Berke Breathed