Hampden Sydney College - Kaleidoscope Yearbook (Hampden Sydney, VA)

Page 10 text:

6 Opening some three centuries - never to everyone's satisfaction to be sure, but also without the process of education itself being regarded as an enormously problematic enterprise, riddled with seemingly insoluble difficulties that re- quire the attention of specially trained ex- perts. ln the past several decades, however, we have trained hundreds of thousands of such experts t educa- tionists as distinguished from mere teachersl, have turned our education system over to them, and are dismayed and surprised at the miserable results. The dismay is justifiable, the surprise is not. The educational theorists who have created modem public education in the U.S. never did believe in shaping young people for participation in this society. Their ambition was to shape young peo- ple so they could fruitfully participate in a much superior - but, alas, nonexistent - society. Hence the neglect of the tradi- tional basics of education - not only literacy and numeracy, but also discipline, good manners, proper speech - in favor of a more creative cur- riculum, a more relaxed social ethos .... Surely we can all, if honest, draw ap- propriate lessons for college education, without a tedious rehearsal here of the miserable state of liberal education and the assorted corruptions that infect old, and once proud, traditional colleges and universities. Hampden-Sydney has suf- fered less than most, far less than some, but it has suffered. However, one ingre- dient of the essential Hampden-Sydney has survived and may be a secret of a greatness we have never dreamed of. The growing popular sense that things are wrong with public education that the simple infusion of more money and more innovation won't cure is a hopeful sign. The spirit of counter-reform, a sort of whistle-blowing on the educationists, is abroad in the land. The most encouraging single feature of this phenomenon is that people want to return to reality - it's Kipling's The Gods of the Copy-Book Headings come to life. People want teachers that know what they are hired to teachg people want school time used for school workg people want schools to be schools. The same spirit is affecting the colleges: faculties are reinstituting Eua-uupyl at-'is.. fz

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Gravestones penetrate the mormng mist in one of the three pre-Civil War cemeteries on the Hampden-Sydney campus, The light of dawn brightens Five Forks Road near the college gates. Op mng

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An aerial view of the campus shows five ot its predominantly Federal style buildings. -Q In the left foreground are The Memorial Gates, commemorating the Hampden-Sydney boys who died in World War I. The tenth-oldest college in the nation - and its only bicentennial college - Hampden-Sydney claims such founders as Patrick Henry and James Madison, and such sons as United States President William Henry Harrison. Venable Hall, now a freshman dormitory, was con- structed in 1825 as the main building of the Union Theological Seminary. I