The OkieLegacy

Castle On The Hill
1937 The Ranger Annual
Northwestern State Teachers' College

Educational Delirium

by Milburn Beaman

The education department stands without a peer as being the most popular department at Northwestern. Whether a student who graduates from this college expects to teach or make a proper matrimonial connection, he must suffer the vicissitudes of the educational classes. It is from Dr. Jordan, Dr. Morris, and Mr. Campbell that we hear for almost four years the interpretations plaved upon the various scientific phenomena relative to the best means of teaching.

If one is inclined to believe that a study of educational principles is insipid, he should come to Northwestern to have his viewpoint altered. The personnel of the department is adroitly chosen so as to afford an intriguing and confusing novelty. If "variety is the spice of life" and one is enrolled in two education classes at one time, as everyone usually is, he can do himself well by alternating his courses between Dr. Morris and Dr. Jordan.

Each instructor has pursued his study for years, and each has searched for truth along similiar roads of intellectual enlightenment; but they have reached in no way the same conclusions. One indocrinates his students with "The New Education," but he never seeks to indoctrinate, because "an intelligent teacher does not indoctrinate." Can it be Dr. Jordan's fault that if all things are scientifically measured it will point to the inevitable truth, that "The New Education" stands unquestionably the impregnable panacea, the irreproachable denouement of all our educational problems?

Let us look for a moment at the other equally brilliant prophet of truth, Dr. Morris. Dr. Morris, as unprejudiced as Dr. Jordan throws lovely scented rosebuds loaded with dynamite into the machinery of "The New Education." He believes bigotry is an intellectual blind-alley, and he weighs with precision the dogma of the "New" and the "Old" educational beliefs and presents them in an unbiased scientific manner. But, incideently, he ostensibly calls to the student's minds that "the New Education" failed abominably in Russia, and that many practically all, of its tenets are nto compatible with psychological truisms.

I hope this failure of complete acquiescence on the part of the education teachers is recognized as being very stimulating to original thinking. Because of it, perhaps, some one from Northwestern will bring about the much needed reconciliation between the conflicting conceptions of education.

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