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Show Page 12 THE SIGNPOST October 11, 1968 fp the (Continued from Page 5) Moreover, they had to learn all those things in a few weeks, since ia young man or woman who volunteers to serve overseas for two years is not volunteering to spend six or eight montths in school back home. Well, few of us in the Peace Corps were experts or even amateurs in education. We needed help, and so naturally enough we asked the colleges and universities of America to design and organize training programs for us. Programs that were supposed to teach people a working knowledge of -a language in 13 weeks were conducted at the pace of a four-year college language course. And as for training in skills well, I suppose I can't fault universities for not having expert well-drillers orlatrine-diggers on their faculties (although you'd .think they might have some people who knew how to teach -teaching), but I can fault them for not being able to locate somewhere pepole who could teach skills. We were lucky that our first groups of Volunteers were enthusiastically resolved to overcome any and all difficulties, because on the whole they arrived overseas with an inadequate knowledge of the host-country language, an incomplete appreciation of thehost-country culture and an insufficient amount of technical skill. And in most instances when we complained about this, we discovered that most colleges and universities reatly didnt want to be bothered with developing new, and badly needed, educational techniques. With a few great exceptions, they indicated pretty clearly to us that if we wanted new techniques, we'd better develop them ourselves. 1 feft 1 U;Jft .fi' "THE ULTIMATE IN FINE FOOD" ORDERS TO TAKE OUT And so we did. And though we still have to go a long way before we teach as well as we should, we teach our particular fields much better than most colleges and universities could right now. We not only teach languages faster and more effectively than any university does, but we teach perhaps 100 languages no university teaches. We teach cultures more perceptively than any university does. There are dozens of skills that we can teach in 13 weeks. Now the reason I have gone on this long on the subject is not to pat the Peace Crops on the back for its training programs which, as I have said, still leave much to be desired or to heap coals of fire upon academia although I don't mind giving it a hotfoot but to suggest that when students rebel against their alma maters they are likely to have more on their minds than dormitory privileges or on-campus industrial recruiting or freedom of speech or pot. If I hear them rightly, they are saying that they want a voice in how universities are run because they don't believe that when it comes to the universities' main job, education, they are run well enough. And if that's what they're saying, I agree. It seems to me that the most effective single step that could be taken to make young people or at least students feel more a part of the society they live in would be not only to give them a far greater voice than they have in the management of universities, but to integrate university activities far more fully than they now are with the life of the community. For the cloistered, inward-looking university may have Featuring Our New Beautiful Dining Room ! Mp 5uey - "Pitfuvud toctA tie been a sensible model 30 years ago, when higher education was undertaken only by the exceptionally privileged or exceptionally gifted, but it makes little sense today when higher education is all but compulsory. In an interview that appeared in the New York Times yesterday, Charley Abrams said that a university should have three functions, education, research and service. I agree, and I will venture to add that if education is a function universities do not perform nearly well enough, and research is a function they perform all too often for the benefit of special political or commercial interests, service to the community is a function they perform hardly at all. Let me quote Mr. Abrams, "Unless the university involves itself in service, eventually it will be ignored ... If it does involve itself, it will help settle the student problem. The student wants to be involved. Students are activists. They want to be of service." As one example of the kind of service universities can perform for the community, Mr. Abrams cited the work of the East Harlem Planning Studio, a joint venture of East Harlem neighborhood groups and students in Columbia's division of urban planning, which he heads. The Studio has been working on vest-pocket parks, backyard beautification schemes, converting town houses into neighborhood centers and a variety of other projects. That's the direction in which the universities must move much more rapidly than they now are moving: toward bringing representatives of the community into the university to teach and learn, and bringing students out of the university Air Conditioned ACCOMMODATIONS FOR LARGE OR SMALL GROUPS FOR INFORMATION OR RESERVATIONS QJl 394-6002 Noodles into the community to learn and teach. I'm talking about studying languages in the community's foreign-language neighborhoods.I'm talking about teaching philosophy the way Socrates taught it, by walking around the community and meeting the people and hearing the gossip and seeing the sights and making those people and that gossip and those sights the text of the lesson. I'm talking about teaching policemen sociology in university lecture halls and teaching university students sociology by letting them ride in police prowl cars; perhaps if such experiences were available there would be fewer students anxious to call policemen "Pigs", and fewer policemen anxious to break students' skulls. I applaud the sociology teach-ed from Berkeley who last spring made participation bona fide participation, not sideline observation in the Poor People's March on Washington a part of one of his courses. Those students learned sociology with their eyes and ears and noses and arms and legs and hearts, not just with their heads. And may I add that a powerful force in influencing both universities and communities to work more closely together could be business and industry and the professions, whose members sit on university baords and are leading citizens in the country's university cities and towns. Certainly business is not overwhelmingly popular among the young people I know best, Peace Corps Volunteers. Only some 12 per cent of the 25,000 who have returned from overseas have gone into business which, to my mind, is a great loss to you, since they're the best young people in the country.I agree with Mr. Roper that young men and women are disturbed about the morality of business, and I'm absolutely sure that that's not a problem business can solve by manipulating its image. For the heart of the matter is that by the standards of many young people, business is immoral beyond the power of a public-relations man to conceal or to alter: the automobile industry vis a vis safety; the tobacco industry vis a vis lung cancer; the trucking industry vis a vis freeways; the pharmaceutical industry vis a vis profit margins; the oil industry vis a vis depletion allowances. Well, I need not go on. Perhaps the pendulum will swing, and the next generation of youths will not be put off by such matters the way this generation is. I hope that doesn't happen though. I'd rather see business raise its moral sights. But, in a way, I think the most damning thing about the relationship between young people and business is that young people don't appear to be nearly as angry at business as they are at the government or the political parties or the universities or the press. I can only account for this with the hypothesis that what business does is not disappointing to young people because their expectation of business is low. Something that is terribly hard, and terribly important, to remember about this generation of university students is that they can afford to be contemptuous about money. They are the children of the affluent society. They have never known a depression. They have never known personal economic hardship. They see poverty only as a condition in which a minority of Americans are unnecessarily and shamefully imprisoned by a wicked and sclerotic establishment. And so many of them simply can't or won't see working for money for profits as an interesting or even as an especially necessary, vocation, and they can't or won't see business as an especially worthwhile institution.. That is why, I think, business seldom makes today's young people angry the wa: .t made young people angry w en I was one of them. Whr' jver business does today, young people, as my grandmother used to say, "take, it from whence it comes." And if that is true, then business indeed must think about fundamental reforms not just in its institutions and its behavior, but most particularly in its values and its goals. That I think, is the challenge, indeed the opportunity, youth today is giving you. And on that cheery note, I'll stop haranguing you and let you cross examine me. Weber State Sft' Art Gallery oct. i4 fr 1-5 p.m. and rlilt'1 7-9 p.m. Lnj :f;.:'r""'ft RESTAURANT HOURS 5:00 p.m. to 12:00 p.m. Closed Tuesday 2430 GRANT AVE. OODEN |