Opinions
Influences colleges
High school unrest spreads
WASHINGTON—The Scranton
Commission in its otherwise wide-angle
report on campus unrest overlooked one
basic dimension: every college student is a
refugee from high school. And American
high schools, as two fresh studies both
financed by the U.S. Office Of Education
remind us, have themselves become
hotbeds of student unrest. Neither study
explores any direct cause-and-effect links
between high school unrest and the turmoil
on college campuses—a subject that
should be getting far more attention. But
one in particular, released by The Center
For Research And Education In American
Liberties at Columbia University, clearly
suggests that such ties may exist.
The Columbia-based team set out to
draft new “behavioral objectives” for
junior and senior high school civics
courses. But in questioning some 6,700
students in New York City and
Philadelphia urban and suburban schools,
it turned up alarming evidence of how the
typically autocratic high school can shape
students’ attitudes and their ways of ex
pressing them. The majority of the
students, if found, see their schools as
basically undemocratic. They are barred
from taking part in decisions affecting
them as individuals and citizens. When
their proposed innovations or their
complaints about how they are treated
cause conflicts, these are usually met with
arbitrary action by teachers and ad
ministrators.
Students angry, frustrated
As a result, comments Alan F. Westin,
Columbia professor and the center’s
director, “The great majority of students
are angry, frustrated, increasingly
alienated by school. “They do not
believe,” Westin continues, “they receive
individual justice or enjoy the rights of
dissent or share in critical decision
making affecting their lives within the
school. “Our schools,” he warns, “are now
educating millions of students who are not
forming an allegiance to the democratic
political system simply because they do
not experience such a democratic system
in their daily lives in school.”
This particular study goes beyond the
question of alienation, however. It ex
plores how students treated like cattle in
high school emerge woefully ill-equipped
to appreciate opposing views, to recognize
and weigh alternative courses of action, to
foresee the effects of whatever course they
follow—in short, to make the mature
political decisions essential in any
democracy.
These, of course, are the same failings
for which today’s college radicals are so
roundly chastised. They are intolerant and
impatient. They stridently press “non
negotiable demands.” They use disrup
tive, sometimes violent, tactics. They
seem to ignore the harm their verbal or
physical assaults can wreak upon those
whom they assault. While the Columbia
study leaves such a conclusion to the
reader, it seems clear that many college
radicals bring with them from high school
their deep distrust of adult authority and
their readiness to mount protests against
those embodying that authority on their
campus.
Countless others, to be sure, escape
political scars in high school and arrive at
college with open minds only to be
“radicalized” by what they encounter
there. But as the sculptor Jacob Epstein
once observed, an open mind is an empty
mind. One can make a strong case that for
these students too, a lack of high school
experience in practical democracy helps
lead their campus political commitments
into undemocratic ways.
The second study, from the policy
institute of the Syracuse University
Research Corp., reports that 85 per cent of
some 700 urban public high schools all over
the country suffered one or more kinds of
disruption over the past three years. The
number and intensity of these incidents, it
says, is growing. Among the many in
terlocking causes of these outbreaks,
including racial tensions, the Syracuse
study also lists student demands for
participation in policy-making.
The policy issues themselves range
from student government and political
organizations to social events, dress codes,
smoking and—increasingly—curriculum.
Through questioning principals, the
Syracuse team reports that only half the
high schools surveyed have voting
students on student-conduct policy bodies,
only 18 per cent have voting students on
disciplinary boards and 20 per cent have
voting students on curriculum com
mittees.
Increased student participation
“It is one thing to be a bit chary about
allowing students to participate in specific
punishment of specific other students,”
the team remarks. “It seems almost ob
solete to refuse to allow students to par
ticipate meaningfully in the actual for
mation of conduct policy.” Both the
Columbia and Syracuse studies call for
steps to increase students’ democratic
participation in high school affairs.
Teaching textbook democracy in civics
class does little good, the Columbia team
concludes, if the students feel that
teachers and principals try to run their
lives for them with ham-handed
despotism.
Principals, similarly, must share
responsibility with students: “Only when
students are involved in the making of
policies and decisions which are of true
civic concern to them, will they be lear
ning to make the type of decisions par
ticipative citizens must make.” As the
Syracuse study points out, students are
transients and “school officials inevitably
get the feeling that they must reinvent the
participation wheel every time another
class comes along.”
There really are taxpayers
On the other hand, the Syracuse group
asserts, “it is almost a truism to point out
that when people being regulated have a
real say in regulations, they are much
more likely to adhere to them. But even
more important values ensue. Students
quickly leam that the management of a
public institution such as school is a
complicated affair largely because of the
variety of legitimate pressures leaning on
such institutions. There really are tax
payers, and they really must have a
certain basic respect for the institutions
they are supporting. And we believe...that
students soon find there is no such thing as
the students’ point of view.”
Neither of these studies promotes
student participation as a panacea. In
deed, the Syracuse team concludes, “short
of a total moral conversion, the American
society will continue to behave in such a
way as to insure some degree of
pathological unrest in our urban high
schools for some time to come.” But both
obviously agree that treating high school
students as citizens in a democracy can
encourage and equip them to act like
democratic citizens—in their schools, and
later, where it is even more important, on
the college campus and in the community.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
News Service
D. J. R. Bruckner
Bombers, radicals needed in politics
If there were no Weatherman, no
guerrilla, would government find it
necessary to invent some? In fact, these
people may not be responsible for all the
bombings. It is easy for anyone to claim
credit in the name of someone else. But the
diversion of violence serves many pur
poses; one wonders if the people or the
radicals have any notion of the necessity of
irrelevance to modern politics.
Revolutions properly are radical shifts
in power and the aggregations of power.
There is a big one going on in this society,
but the crazies have nothing to do with it.
—The automobile, the vehicle of
personal independence, allows the
American to run all over the continent at
will. But it has bred worldwide industries
of almost uncontrollable power: auto,
construction, oil, for instance. Spending on
highways is fantastic, most of it federal;
the vehicle of personal independence has
immensely broadened the power of central
government and it has almost wiped out
local government as an instrument of real
political decisions.
Hitler used communications
—Former Nazi official Albert Speer
says Adolf Hitler used communications,
mostly telephone and radio, to wipe out the
middle level of command, to give central
government direct authority over in
dividuals. Communications are much
improved since then. And, in an age of
superweapons, a ruler does not have to
worry about the loyalties of as many
rwMjple as he once did: big weapons are
easy to employ and the people do not have
to be bothered quite so much.
—Radio and television bring the world
home. But they turn consumer research
and advertising into political movements.
A man with, say, 30 million dollars at
hand, can use them to be elected
president; and, once in office, he can use
them to overwhelm opposition and preach
doctrine unrestrained. On fast planes he
can fly about bouncing his homebound
messages off the heads of foreign rulers.
The entire electronic communications
system comes under control of men he has
the power to appoint.
Computers, still almost untried
wonders, really should be able to
revolutionize daily life, to bring in the age
of creativity and abundance. They also
give government, and some huge
businesses, control over intelligence data
of all types, information about individuals,
immediate, unforgetful, untempered by
any feeling.
—Basic research gives us all this
wealth, and education has the power of
freedom. But, within a couple of decades,
the major funding of research and
education has shifted to one source—
Washington; the power of control is im
measurable. Many technological
developments which change our lives
forever are researched and developed by
government-funded technocrats who are
personally committ.ed to their success.
Technology helps crime
—New technologies, travel systems
and monetary systems greatly increase
the muscle of organized crime. The ad
ministration refuses to mention the Mafia
now, but Mafiosi and their allies can
operate over political boundaries more
easily every day. They run money in and
out of foreign banks on a colossal scale;
their power in legitimate business is
growing all the time.
—Rapid development in bugging,
wiretapping, photographing and
surveillance devices of other types allows
governments to conduct foreign affairs
mostly through intelligence operations.
They also give governments in-depth
control of citizens. This month Atty. Gen.
John Mitchell himself was boasting of the
succes his office has had in bugging and
tapping suspects (there is a large group of
people he claims the right to intrude on
whom he refuses to enumerate at all),
encouraging local police to use these
devices and sneering at “absolute civil
liberatarians.” When there was a dispute
about the size of the crowds at last year’s
Moratorium Day in Washington, the
Defense Department released an un
comfortably clear aerial photograph of
that crowd. Were you thinking of an in
discretion on the beach for tomorrow?
The government has tea-tasters at
work. And more. Increasingly, everything
consumable by man, and a lot of beasts—
agricultural products, food, drugs, drink—
is controlled by government in quantity,
quality, manufacture, packaging, supply,
distribution. If the environment is to be
saved, its control must increase in the
future.
Such megasystems are not vulnerable
to a few bombs. Weatherman is important
to the maintenance of power much in the
way the illusion of traditional party
politics is, or traditional patriotism; they
distract, and do not interfere with the
power. Sometimes they allow government
to increase its power of surveillance,
control, arrest.
Manifestly the political system is not a
control mechanism over the real
revolution in everyday life. Whether it can
be rebuilt into such a system of control is
the overriding problem of the times.
Technological change seems more
palatable to many than political change,
however. Ironically, Weatherman and his
like are parts of the power system.
Los Angeles Times-Washington Post
News Service
Letters
Who
I was reading in the Emerald recently
about James Weaver’s talk at the Free
Speech Platform and how he was catering
his ideas to student views on the issues. It
is interesting to note, that in the July 26
Oregonian, he stated his views to another
set of voters, “These are the people who
often wear the American flag and carry
stickers on their cars that say ‘America,
Love It or Leave it.’ This is the vote I’m
working to represent, and if I get it, I’ll
win—there is no question on that point.”
Who, exactly, is Mr. Weaver trying to
represent’’ James A. MacDaniels
Junior—Poli Sci