Salutes

With a new school year beginning, the nation's press and pulpit delivered themselves last week of their perennial salutes to learning. Notable among many observations on contemporary education were these:

Football Background. Interviewed in Manhattan, Dr. Charles Leo O'Donnell, president of football-famed Notre Dame University, said: "Behind a great football team there must be an intellectual and moral background, and while a first-rate college can function successfully without football, a good football team always goes with a good college. Athletes look to the greatness of a college and are inspired to uphold its intellectual and moral prestige." Soft Drinks, Sandwiches. In commenting on his announcement that henceforth the University of Washington will eliminate courses of a vocational or trade nature, said President Matthew Lyle Spencer: "In other words, it is our belief that education in a university should not do for society in general that which society can do for itself. It is almost as reasonable for us to teach our pharmacy students how to mix soft drinks or to make sandwiches for the drug store trade." True Portrait. To offset the impression which the cinema, college publications and "the genial cynicism or barbed criticism of editorial comment in journals of opinion" create about college life, President Ernest Martin Hopkins of Dartmouth in his convocation address gave his idea of the academic scene. Said he: "The true portrait of the American college would show a community in which generosity of spirit and graces of culture are predominant, where eagerness for truth and wisdom pervades the atmosphere, where the co-operative enterprise which we call education is carried on with mutual esteem and respect between faculty and students. It would likewise show, to be sure, some degree of self-seeking and self-indulgences, some effort to arrogate special privileges to individual selves, some pride of opinion, some intellectual arrogance, and some close-mindedness, but these would appear as they are, merely as blemishes upon the portrait. Each college generation has it within its power to refine or to smudge this portrait." Horrid Picture. More doleful was the outlook of eloquent, beetle-browed little Warden Bernard Iddings Bell of St. Stephens College (New York), whose views appear in the current Bookman. Excerpt: "Assurances that illiteracy is decreasing among us or that many more children than used to go on nowadays to secondary school and college . . . are, to be sure, sources of joy; but still the horrid picture remains of an increasing immaturity at the top of the intellectual pile--of a world dominated and directed by retarded adolescents. Peter Pan is a charming figure in fantasy; but a real world led by little boys who have never grown up is a concept that has nightmare possibilities. . . . "One of the first assumptions of American education seems to be that fathers and mothers are invariably incompetent and that teachers, under the direction of skilled 'scientists in education,' are the proper and infallible guides of youth. Unfortunately, most parents are in fact deeply impressed by the current mumbo-jumbo obfuscation created by school masters as a class. . . . "Perhaps the time has arrived for a revolt against those who are now in control of American schools, a revolt not in the name of reaction but in the name of common sense, a revolt against a radicalism which seems to believe that in things of the mind there need be no roots whatever, a revolt against an attempt to conserve all the facts while ignoring the human factor."

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