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

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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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4 Opening iamelfa dcmfaefz . M . ne of the most intelligent and ar- ticulate commentators on our age and its woes, lrving Kristol, opened an essay thus: The intellectual historian of the future, looking back on the past half-century of American experience, will surely be struck by a phenomenon we may call the tyranny of ideas. lt is a tyran- ny exercised by academic, quasi- academic, and pseudo-academic ideas over the common sense embodied in the practical reason of traditional wisdom . In area after area of American life . . . we have witnessed educated and well- meaning people trying to impose, en- thusiastically and obstinately, their 'truths' about human nature or social reality upon the real world. Kristol, arguably the leading exponent of political, social, and economic conser- vatism, frequently, as here, approaches in a very gratifying as well as intriguing way the theological Neo-conservatism of Reinhold Niebuhr. l-le goes on to say: What one calls 'neo-conservatism' among American intellectuals is distinguished above all by a keen sense of the incongruence between popular academic theories and what used to be called 'the facts of life.' lThe French phrase la force des choses - which may be roughly translated as the 'coercive power of permanent realities' - gives a more vivid impression of what is meant.l And what we call the 'populist conser- vatism' among ordinary Americans is marked by an outraged assertion of the validity of received wisdom as against abstract, academic 'innovative' theoriz- ing. These attitudes are bound to become more influential as the suicidal consequences of defying reality ithe in- transigent world 'out there'l are ever more evident. Of course we all, both the enlightened and the deluded, dream and hope and strive. In this fallen world, we live out the perpetual curse of scheming and working to overcome our humanity. lt is part of human nature to try to trans- cend being human, this is one of the paradoxes of life. Practical examples abound. We devise preservatives for food and increase the incidence of cancer and other diseases. We invent convenient modes of transportation and kill cheerful travelers by the thousand. We build fone of Kristol's examplesl prisons - pardon me, correctional facilities - that are opulent Temples of Rehabilitation, and see the crime rate, even the crime rate in prisons, soar. Dame Folly, we love you. All this, of course, is done in what has become, these past umpteen generations of the sons of men, the sacred name of Progress. But now there are stirrings - Mr. Kristol is a stirrer - that something ain't right. A lot of expensive change has, not apparently but obviously, compound- ed evil, not eradicated it. As Bertrand Russell tnot alone, to be surel remarked, Change is one thing, progress is another. And so much of this agonizing change, with its consequent messes, has been foisted off on us because the changers could not or would not accept reality, or the realities. We at l-lampden-Sydney have a grand oppor- tunity to stand, in the pseudo-debate about co-education, for realism, if that is what acceptance of reality means. Hear Kristol again: The sterility and ultimate futility of this tyranny of ideas are visible in matters large and small. Take education, for in- stance, about which there is now so much ferment. There is absolutely nothing mysterious about educating their society. The human race has been doing it for thousands of years and we Americans have been doing it on a large scale for 6-an-uupgd

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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