University of Miami - Ibis Yearbook (Coral Gables, FL)

Page 16 text:

NO TURN ij : : - tali Martin Weinkle will be remembered by many of this year ' s seniors as the 1969-70 Student Body Vice-President, and was prominent as a coor- dinator of the fall 1969 Moratoria and the Strike in the spring of 1970. Actively involved in politics, Weinkle is currently completing his Ph. D. in poli- tics and legal theory at Brandeis University. this all it are

Page 15 text:

The battle lines were shifting. Impercep- tibly at first, but then with blinding speed as the counter-establishment weathered the coup. The young people were there on Miami Beach in the summer. They were there in the Beach hotels, canvassing dele- gates. They were in the Convention Hall as delegates and campaign aides. They were in the media anchor booths, doing legwork for the networks. Oh, yes . . . and there were some people on Wash- ington Avenue one night . . .

Page 17 text:

Let me begin with a quote from Camus, which, if all proceeds according to plan, will lay the foundation for this essay: I ' ve had plague all these years long years in which paradoxically enough, I ' d believed with all my soul that I was fighting it. I learned that I had an indirect hand in the deaths of thousands of people; that I ' d even brought about their deaths by approving of acts and principles which could only end that way. I During these past years, most of my thoughts have been consumed with purposes and direc- tions in my life. And at times, when I ' ve felt so sick from prejudices and failures and Nixon and it all, that I ' m ready to move to some secluded cove in Maine, I suddenly realize again my re- sponsibilities to myself and my environment and think that although I ' m consumed by dark- ness, I have only to venture in and thus see the light and know whatever it is all about. I believe, although often acting to the contrary, that concoctions and thoughts of philosophy are never really my own unless I am fully these thoughts. In essence, I can speak truthfully only of that which I am. I believe that growth is es- sential to my humanness and that I grow only through concern with my own being, with the affairs of the world around me, and with production in that world. Subversion, insecurity and pain are necessities in my life. Drowning is not. I believe that one should always continue to revolt against what he perceives to be the ills in his society. And so I revolt. I have begun to believe that schooling as it is now continues to be one of those ills. And I am not anti-intellec- tual but precisely the opposite. We are raised to believe that each of us is a very unique animal, possessing a unique structure comprising mind and body. But as we begin to declassify, as our generation is doing during this particular time in history, we find that we all share many of the same storms and stresses. Schooling has been for us mainly custodial care. It exists to take us off the street until we are set loose to make our way on the street, supposedly more adeptly than we otherwise might have. What is ironical is that the more schooling we have, the more despressing the withdrawal from it becomes. Yet, we are to believe our schooling a privilege, and indeed it is, principally because it is only for a privileged few. It is true that the more we immerse our- selves in this privilege, the more certificates we will receive and the more doors will be opened? I believe this is not so in most cases. In reality we are trained only for obsolescence, consuming the same products in different wrappers from the same producers; filling the same old molds. Amidst this all, thinking has become a direct challenge to the established infrastructures. We have patterned schooling around our often clouded observations of what a child must do and act like in the future. From our youngest days, in a society structured around the maypoles of age and rank, we are taught to believe ourselves supremely intelligent; thus we belong in school, learn in school, and can only be taught in school. Consequently we all come to believe that our learning results direct- ly from our attendance in school. This increases with self-input (checks on our report card for working to our full ability) and with grades and documentation by certificates as adequate and sole proof of performance. In this light, one may not challenge the lies and ill preparedness of one ' s teacher lest his grade be lowered. The result of this all comes to be that once we believe all value can be measured, we as humans tend to alienate ourselves from our- selves even further, accpeting all kinds of rankings for the value of almost everything. And with all the degrees and certificates, we come to distrust each other so that we journey on endlessly, choosing specialists here and special- ists there to solve our every problem. Many of us have been alienated by a system of laws which we have learned were conceived as the cornerstone of a society ' s existence and its people ' s self-protective mechanism. But we have watched and seen that it is a system which in reality is constantly denegrated, changed, ig- nored, and falsified by self-seeking power struc- tures, which, because they are contained under the guise of the state, disallow any challenge