Kent State University - Chestnut Burr Yearbook (Kent, OH)

Page 25 text:

A dministration UyUMgiU ' MyyU k u h l L ' Mi Uiiitw iWi Uk Mk VitUMlU Mk IFTSW W vWWNN . t1 W W W MNJPk I NR RNki ' iwi ' i ' flWk

Page 27 text:

FROM PRESIDENT ENGLEMAN S INAUGURAL ADDRESS Recent years have exhibited a wholesome tendency upon the part of many biographers and historians to debunk both history and biography. When teachers and texts content themselves with the elimination of bunk, they do a real service to the cause of Truth. But when youth is duped and deceived into thinking that men long acclaimed as great were wholly cheap and vulgar, void of purpose opportunists, only then historic criticism over-leaps itself, and the latter state may be worse than the former. It may at least be questioned whether social progress is furthered more by our Menckens than by our Weems. Literature has assumed new forms and new aims, characteristic of the times in which we live. It paints marvelous pictures today, many of them beautiful, many of them sordid, most of them realistic. Nothing is too vulgar and mean, little too sensual, for the printed page of a magazine or book because they collectively portray life as it can be found. But this is not literature. At best it is only one type of literature. There are other types. Who can say that Lowell and Longfellow and Burns, Milton, Tennyson and Browning and Shakespeare will not live in spite of their obvious attempts to preach to us — nay, more, because they succeeded in doing it, when poems and books full of sex but without a soul will have been forgotten. Paul Whiteman is the exponent of one type of music. It has its place. I do not condemn it. But it is not the whole of music, nor even the best of it. Sokoloff in Cleveland and Damrosch in New York are helping to popularize another type that will live and minister to the best emotions of the human heart when jazz has been stilled forever. Now what I have said about history, biography, literature and music has been said to emphasize one point. To my mind it is a most important one. There is an aspect of each of these subjects, a method of approach to it or an interpretation of it, that can be used to magnify and vivify the students respect for fundamentals in life — spirituality, patriotism, idealism, culture, refinement. Our plea is for teach- ing that integrates, there is too much that disintegrates. When science teaching destroys the essential in a student ' s religion, it becomes a disintegrating force. When our history is debunked to the point that youth is made cynical in its attitude; towards our most dearly bought institutions, and their founders, his- torical criticism has become their enemy. When literature is taught so that the student no longer aspires to hitch his wagon to a star because his eyes are fixed upon the mud and filth about his feet, teaching needs a new objective, and school- room courses in literature need a renaissance. A teacher ' s college must be ad- ministered and courses taught so that its graduates go out into the profession of their choice with a great desire to communicate their vision of life as a unity to children and youth who do not have it. Facts of life, if we recognize them as such, are easy to teach. Their meanings, their hidden implications, their bearing upon eternal verities, are matters of greater concern. Knowledge has to become wisdom to be dynamic and it is at this point that our greatest responsibility is to be found in a school that is authorized to prepare young men and women to teach Ohio ' s children. Jmmlf Page twenty-three