Comm eintary
Oregon Daily Emerald
Tuesday, May 17, 2005
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The Oregon Daily Emerald is pu6
lished daily Monday through Fri
day during the school year by the
Oregon Daily Emerald Publishing
Co. Inc., at the University of Ore
gon, Eugene, Ore. The Emerald
operates independently of the
University with offices in Suite
300 of the Erb Memorial Union.
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■ In my opinion
Apathy epidemic
The concept of free public educa
tion for all citizens originated in
America. It makes sense that a socie
ty that recognized the value of edu
cation for all people would be the
first to experiment with democracy
on a grand scale. After all, if the peo
ple are going to rule, the people need
to get some learning.
And that’s exactly why we devel
oped free public education — to
make better citizens. In the America
of the Puritans, being a better citizen
meant being a better Christian, so
early public education was largely
religious. However, the emphasis on
education as a necessary prerequisite
to a functioning democracy persisted
even after the notion of separation of
church and state was established.
Sadly, it seems the purpose of edu
cation in our society is no longer to
make better citizens. When we’re
growing up, we're told we need to go
to college so we can get a job. When
we tell people what we’re studying
in school, the next question is almost
always concerned with how we’ll
use that degree to make a living.
Whether you go to a liberal arts
university or technical school, on
some level you’re always training in
our education system for a job. I
don’t believe this is necessarily a bad
thing. We all need jobs and we all
need to learn how to do our jobs. So
why not learn that at school? My
concern, though, is that job training
has gone from being one of the
things we do in school to being basi
cally the only thing.
Being able to hold down a good
job and maintain a productive career
is only one part of being a good citi
zen, yet it is the part on which our
education system places almost all
emphasis. We lack the knowledge
and guidance to make many impor
tant decision in our public and
private lives.
For instance, a while back, I was
helping my sister plan her schedule
—. ~..
GABE BRADLEY
THE WRITING ON THE WALL
for high school. I was shocked to
learn that her high school required
no government or civics class. They
offered two government courses, but
they were not requirements. I shud
der to think there are countless indi
viduals walking around Eugene with
a diploma from a 4J high school who
have no clue how their national,
state or local governments work.
No wonder the eDidemic of apa
thy has reached a new high (or
should I say a new low) in this coun
try — our schools are letting us
down. We’re not even equipping our
citizens with enough information to
choose apathy. We’re just letting stu
dents coast through school without
ever telling them public life is an im
portant force in their daily lives or
teaching them how they can be a
part of it. This is ridiculous. At the
very least could someone pop in the
Schoolhouse Rock video about how
a bill becomes a law?
By the time I got to high school,
civics class was long gone. At least
we were required to take one semes
ter of government before we were al
lowed to graduate, but even this
seems to be going the way of
the dodo.
Graduating high school is the ba
sic educational benchmark for
adults in our society. High school
curriculum ought to represent the
cannon of knowledge and experi
ence that we expect of adults in our
society. Yet this unimpressive set of
standards is increasingly becoming
a joke every year.
K-12 is basically ground school for
the rest of your life. For some reason,
though, it is becoming less important
to teach people how to be active in
the communities in which they find
themselves, and more important to
teach them how to fill in annoying
answer bubbles.
This trend especially disturbs me
as I approach the point in my life in
which I will be sending children to
school. I always thought that school
would teach my children how to be
good citizens, while I would teach
them how to be good people. Now I
realize I will have to do both.
Unless there is a significant
change, newspapers as we know
them will be all but extinct in the
next 20 years or so. This is only one
symptom of a loss of community
consciousness. We all want to be in
volved, but we don't have the first
clue how to be. I love the Daily Show
as much as next guy. It makes me
laugh. It also makes me cry.
I cry when I think about the fact
that more people in this country get
their information from the Daily
Show with Jon Stewart than from a
daily newspaper. Even Stewart has
said it’s ridiculous for people to turn
to a comedy show as their primary
source of information. And yet here
we are.
I think we need to bring civics
class and the newspaper back in one
fell swoop. If I had my druthers,
every high school in this country
would require at least two years of a
civics, government and public life
course in which the daily newspaper
was the required reading. Teaching
our children to be responsible adults
in the society in which they live is
just about the most important thing
we can do for them. And if filling in
the bubbles has to take a back seat to
civic education, somehow I’ll man
age to live with that choice.
gabebradley@dailyememld.com
INBOX
NPR and PBS are not
unbiased news sources
I just read your editorial “Keep
NPR free from government influ
ence” (ODE May 16), and can hardly
believe the level of naivete and con
descension you managed to roll into
a single editorial. News consumers
want news, not spin, and they're not
so stupid as to a) not realize when
they're being spun and/or b) not re
sent when journalists flatly deny that
they report from a certain perspec
tive. The “b” is most important and
explains why FOX News is a success
— the network doesn't pretend to be
“values neutral.” Also, if you've ever
watched FOX News you know that
the network more often than not of
fers both sides of the debate.
To pretend that NPR and PBS are
somehow neutral is patently laugh
able. With his recent changes at the
Public Broadcasting System, it ap
pears that corporation head Kenneth
Tomlinson is attempting to serve all
the public.
Ned Williams
Nashville
Legalizing marijuana
diminishes gateway effect
Regarding your thoughtful editori
al about marijuana (“Marijuana pos
es lesser threat than violent theft,”
ODE May 12): Actually, marijuana
poses less danger than a cup
of coffee.
If we drink 65 cups of coffee in a
single day, we have a serious chance
of dying as a result. On the other
hand, if we smoke the most potent
marijuana available in the world, all
day l«ng, the worst effect would be
a severe case of the munchies.
As for the so-called “gateway ef
fect”: Because marijuana is illegal, it
is sold by criminals. These criminals
often sell other, more dangerous
drugs and often offer free samples of
the more dangerous drugs to their
marijuana customers. Thus the
gateway effect.
Legalize, regulate, tax and control
the sales of marijuana and we close
the gateway to hard drugs.
Kirk Muse
Arizona
U.S. drug policy directly
targets college students
The Daily Emerald rightly criticizes
our nation's criminal justice priorities
in the era of the War on Drugs (“Mari
juana poses lesser threat than violent
theft,” ODE May 12).
Violent criminals are allowed to
roam free while our prisons are filled
with nonviolent drug offenders. The
misguided War on Drugs also directly
targets students.
Since 1998, more than 160,500 stu
dents have been denied financial aid
because they have drug convictions.
Rapists, murderers, burglars and ar
sonists are all free to receive financial
aid once they’ve otherwise paid their
debt to society; only drug offenders
have the doors of education automati
cally slammed shut in their faces.
Students who want to help change
misguided drug policies that negatively
affect them should start a chapter of
Students for Sensible Drug Policy. Visit
www.DAREgeneration.com for more
information.
Tom Angell
Students for Sensible Drug Policy
■ Editorial
University is
out of touch
with the aim
of diversity
Several recent occurrences on this campus
have prompted the Editorial Board to tackle
what could — even on the best of days — be
deemed a difficult subject: ethnic diversity and
racism at the University. Several events have
characterized what can be described best as an
outbreak of unrest.
First, the recent accusations lobbed at the
College of Education. Students have made
claims, yet to be investigated, of racist and
discriminatory comments by professors in
classrooms and have said the school has cre
ated or ignored a hostile environment for mi
nority students. The number of requests by
sources within the COE to remain anonymous
have made it clear that the school is permeat
ed with fear of retribution. That a school’s
climate could be so negative, with students
afraid to speak out, clearly indicates an
egregious abuse of power.
We applaud the University’s choice to bring
in Dr. Carlos E. Cortes, a professor from Univer
sity of California, Riverside, to conduct an ex
ternal review of diversity issues in the College
of Education. We must take his suggestions se
riously and not forget about this mess after the
report is finished. Regardless of whether the in
dependent review finds the allegations to be
true, the students at the COE have felt uncom
fortable, and this problem must be corrected.
Second, the Emerald’s documentation of the
Office of Multicultural Academic Support’s en
rollment restriction in certain classes, which re
serves slots for racial minorities, has raised the
ugly specter of what some have called reverse
discrimination. Despite OMAS’ claims that the
policy is strictly legal, we suspect the policy
might be illegal, but not necessarily misguided,
considering how minority students have felt in
the COE’s general classes.
We hoped this academic institution had
reached the point of colorblindness, but appar
ently the University is far less advanced than
we thought. The situation with OMAS has high
lighted the underlying racism in the Universi
ty’s attempts to build a diverse campus on the
foundation of a student population that is
roughly 87 percent white.
Here in Oregon, “multicultural” is how we
spin the question “what category of race do you
fit into?” The options offered by the OMAS
(“African-American, Asian-American/Pacific Is
lander, Chicano/Latino, Native American or
Multiracial”) are so narrow that they verge on
insulting anyone truly multicultural. This will
ingness to simplify such a complex issue shows
the true problem; the University is willing to see
racial minorities as tokens it needs to obtain
and retain to create diversity. It’s like saying, “I
need to find more Asian friends,” and not un
derstanding why such an attitude would be in
sulting to Asians.
Finally, Greg Vincent, vice provost for the Of
fice of Institutional Equity and Diversity, has
announced his departure from the University,
and we cannot help but feel at a loss for hope
in the matter of diversity. It is a shame to see
the man charged with solving these issues
leave. With him goes another step toward real
work in resolving these problems.
EDITORIAL BOARD
Jennifer Sudick Steven R. Neuman
Editor in Chief Managing Editor
Ailee Slater
Commentary Editor
Shadra Beesley
Copy Chief
Adrienne Nelson
Online Editor