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

Page 11 text:

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

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

Page 12 text:

-o A.. H x S L Diana Bunting, wife of the College'-s President, enjoys the sunlight and snow with her daughter Elizabeth. Behind the trees is Cushing Hall, the oldest four-story dormitory in North America that is still being used to house students. , , , . ,.- . , . l ' w ' - ', '. .a-- 'K1 a.,'ff-' ' ' J- if -N 6 - :A '91 Q, J-T. if :,.,Z if 4' 5' si v qu' - PQ., ' Q is , 1521, , ' . ' 1 N , :R T :g3e,l' 'E-Tis.-.-. I-f 'z .. Z'..:.I'- 'vii' Us a J Q' 'als 'IB i 55? Y-f'f5r75A' -' 1 3-'H'-7 . - A ,. .,-jf.'1L!A -, K a.-ph' f . -'V' X153 .3 W I 4241: ' D, . , nr' ,tf 'H. 741 if L.- J :NA l , AA 'T ANL - ' 3 . fn-'g,' -V ' ', hug' ic- 5' L ' . ' ' i 1 V'-iv . ' ' . ,Ll , J .1 FIV I . jlbs F kr f ip . v':Q, --- Q . f In l, - -- Q - --f' 4- I ,,g.:..f, --.v,,. 3 . , 2 J X' . b :ge -f3k1F1fe,a -,in .. a J,.'.kI.:!. gh 'QM f f- 1 W'-1' ' 'fri 'FQIS1 - t.. f ,N -- -. 5, V I B df, ibm- I--,n I ' . , T ' ' ,, A JIS . 1 ' I . lg, .fxpf -'sl ' MTL? lk?-1 ' 1 sf,-'4'7' .I 4' '. ,-I' ' . ,,,.e.., .-Q . y ,- -1---s, , ff 5 .el fl' if Y i ,Q . , ?- , . ,' ' 4 1 .. v. A ',' , , -- uv? '. t -fivqf f' L ,- -'. ' , .. . .1 K . is . 'bien language, math, and English re- quirements, academic standards for athletes are being tightened, students are hearing from their older brothers that the easy route may not be the best route. In this context, in higher as well as second- ary education, we can begin to take heart, we can, albeit cautiously, be fwith lwing Kristoll confident that reality will, in the end, prevail over even the most sophisticated of sophistical theories. Maybe - just maybe - we can remind our country-men, as part of their great awakening, of a reality: men are different from women. There are things they do in the company of other men that women do not enjoy, find necessary, or even comprehend - if indeed they don't find them boring or ridiculous. There are things men do better when by themselves. One of these just may be pursuing a liberal education. After all, women's notion of liberal education is dif- ferentg in a way it is, in the long reach of Western education, more inclusive of the aesthetic components of intellectual development, but that need not detain us here. As liberal education has been defin- and established in America, that for ' Q17 .5 'V R QHQ j iw . fs'-f 'L ve lj 7, . pr, 1' -:fn women is just different. Such a difference alone justifies different settings, different institutions, for men and women to pur sue their educations, both called liberaI,',' but demonstrably different. Historically, coeducation is a new, a very new thing. Even in the public secondary schools it was not widely prac- ticed, except in rural areas, until well into this century - and in those rural areas the chief reason for it was economic. The last public high schools to be all-male, Central in Philadelphia and Erasmus Hall and Bronx High School of Science in New York, did not become coeducational until within the last fifteen years. The first col- lege to be founded as a coeducational place was the tiresomely eccentric Oberlin in 1833, the current hysterical push to co-education did not widely af- fect private colleges until the past twenty years, when it did so fas has been the case with most social changes in the same periodi with puerile frenzy. Not all affected have been happy. Many alumni and alumnae of formerly single-sex col- leges have signaled their displeasure in obvious ways. Some formerly all-female schools fnotably Vassarj have, after a ll Jana