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Mark Hopkins, student, and log are a 19th Century legend. Nietzsche a alyzed e ucators and educa tees: "To all those belauded sages of the academic chairs, wisdom was sleep without dreams . . . Blessed are the drowsy ones for they shall soon nod to sleep." Playwright Eugene O'Neill, nearly 50 years ago, asked: "Why can't our education respond logically to our needs ? I think that I felt at college that we were not in touch with life or on the trail of the real things." Sol M. Linowitz admitted in a recent newspaper in terview that a commencement speaker at his alma mater in the 1930s, when Europe was being torn apart, "spoke for an hour about the world and never once mentioned Hitler or Mussolini." A report issued by the Center for Research and De velopment in Higher Education at the University of Cal ifornia, Berkeley, observed that "student activitists are increasingly confronting the faculty over academic is sues." Reviewing that report, New York Times Educa tion Editor Fred M. Hechinger said that most profes sors appear happy to let students run their own lives out side the classroom, but "are extremely reluctant to give them extensive powers over curriculum matters." The reason, Hechinger noted, was because such involvement in academic affairs challenges professors in their areas of competence and runs head on into those powers and privileges which faculties have fought hard to attain. The faculties seem to be saying, Is it not the teacher's sole responsibility to determine what can and should be taught? Faculty bureaucracies, Hechinger continued, like most other established systems, are essentially conserva tive. "Requirements, once spun into the curriculum, are not easily removed, even when they are obsolete." Here and there in the educating profession, how ever, there are individuals whose attitudes reflect the idea that changes in the present system are long over due. Student discontent, strikes, and revolts may really be good for us, they say, because they call dramatic at tention to the need for change. One of these individuals is Floyd Zulli, Professor of Romance Languages at New York University, a literary specialist on television, and Chairman of the Board of Editors of the new 50 volume World's Great Classics (Grolier). Zulu admits he is 80% behind the student rebels. Harold Taylor, dynamic president for 14 years of Sarah Lawrence College, has authored two new books which outline his ideas for radical changes in universi ties: Students Without Teachers (McGraw-Hill) and The World as Teacher (Doubleday). Taylor contends that American universities have failed to relate their students to the world's fast changing social order. Our educational system "is still parochial," he says. He sug gests that developing teachers who are more oriented to what is going on in the world would help considerably. "Education is becoming progressive in spite of itself, now doing for education what the progressive educators were not able to do for the students or for society." At Harvard, a group of teaching fellows circulated a petition which echoed the feelings of the restless. Signed by more than a thousand students, it said: "Professors are hired for their research achievements, not their teaching ability. Almost the only educational technique employed by senior faculty members is the lecture, in volving no communication or concern. Grades are awarded for effective mimicry. The university seems not to care for the self-understanding, self-respect or inde pendent thought of its students." In the face of all this, let us ask ourselves some im portant questions: 1) Is it fair, in today's world, simply to expose students to lengthy lecture or reading projects and then test their ability to remember?and call it education? 2) Should students accept something a teacher says as true or right, just because the teacher said it? 3) Shouldn't students have a say in how their destinies are to be shaped? 4) Aren't they worth listening to? 5) Haven't students shown that they are much more concerned with what they themselves see, hear, and feel today, than with what older generations experi enced yesterday? 6) Does our education system provide the very best preparation for the young people who will one day succeed us? |
