United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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age are to be crammed, not twice a year, but all the year with facts and more facts. At no other time in your life will those facts stick as readily, and at no other time will they prove “the good seed that will bring forth a harvest, some thirty-fold, some sixty-fold, and some one hundred-fold.” Yes, we stand by our ancient aim. It is still up-to-date. It is the second part of our aim, set in the first part: humanistic interests and standards, and knowledge set therein. The third part of the aim has never been realized in its true perspective. If it had been, there would not have been as much bickering between the champions of cultural interests and those of practical vocational interests. Professor Dewey states the aim in, “To find out what one is fitted to do, and to secure an opportunity to do it is the key to happiness.” A nurse registers in First Year Arts. She wants the broad cultural training for her fine service later to humanity. Is there any reason that she should not be encour¬ aged all along the line of studies to find her professional specialties in cultural generalities? Will she know any less of literature if she catches visions of using that literature in passing the monotonous hours with patients, either for herself, or for the purpose of reading to them? Will her chemistry be any the less academic if it is used in nursing experimentation? She fortunately knows what she wants to do and can be expected to make the connections between culture and professional training. The majority of students do not know their aptitudes. Is this then not a new angle of approach; viz: to test out when registering and in every subject to be studied certain likes and dislikes and certain abilities and disabilities? Can we expect young people to know “what makes for breadth, for freedom, for service, for the cultivation of intellectual and personal ideals”? Why should we not cater to all and sundry, and allow them, even encourage them, to turn aside at any time in their college career, and to follow their particular “bent”? We should be expected as administrators and teachers to be able to see that “bent” at all times in a cultural background. Will not the cultural background be all the richer when the “bent” is found? Will there not be more desire on the part of the boy or girl with the “bent” to remain the full time? Then and probably not till then will the student be, as Havelock Ellis suggests he should be, “a serene spectator of the absurdity of the world, and at the same time, a strenuous worker in the ration¬ alization of the world!” But who is to try to accomplish all this? Surely educational nipples are not to be supplied to mere spectators and dawdlers! Are not the students capable of being anxious to (Continued on page 28) [9]

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find reward for their work far less in pecuniary and personal ag¬ grandisement, and far more in the work itself, and in the part it will play in the well-being of society as a whole.” Those who believe that society must be fed and clothed, and that, after that, society does not exist for mere perpetual wealth production, see in these times more urgent demands than ever for men and women of vision, of unselfishness, of power to think and work, all in close harmony with their fellow-beings. Let the day-dreaming in class be patterned after this fashion rather than out of the memories of last evening functions and next week’s social event! Surely those who look for unity in our social and political life, and for freedom for develop¬ ment in our individual life, are to be found within our colleges. That aim ought to be as clear and definite in college, as the technical aim is in the technical school. Is not the job of bridging chasms in our civic, national and international life more important than the bridg¬ ing of the rivers that run to the sea? If this is to be the task of the college of today for the world of tomorrow, the college must cultivate human interests and stand¬ ards. “It probably has no higher function than to impress upon every student that he or she is a social being, a ‘civis,’ a citizen who may not live unto himself in aristocratic and intellectual isolation. He is to cultivate a passion for service and not for frittering. That passion is to be disciplined and refined and humanized, like to the passion of Arnold’s apostles of equality for “diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge of their times; who labor to divest knowledge of all that is harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to hu¬ manize it, to make it effective outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, and yet to keep it the best knowledge and thought of the time.” This is what might be called the deeply disciplined emotional side of the college training. The second part is as old as the colleges themselves: the love of knowledge for its own sake; the long and deep meditation upon science, mathematics, history, literature, philosophy and religion. College students must know and know that they know. Classrooms and libraries are not places for pooled prejudices. The very secrets of nature and human nature are to be discovered. Minds are “to come to themselves.” We have heard sermons galore on “where there is no vision, the people perish” and have forgot or have never known that the same Book says “where there is no knowledge, the people perish.” No apology is here offered for saying that the recep¬ tive minds of young people from seventeen to twenty-one years of [ 8 ]

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ARS QUIXOTICA NEIL A. DEWAR T)ACK in the late fall of 1930, in the relatively halcyon days before - - either the Nazi nightmare or the Five-Year Plan were faits accomplis, a solemn body of martially uniformed aesthetes fore¬ gathered in the shadow of the Kremlin and announced that “the method of art is the method of dialectic materialism,” and that artists should abandon “individualism” as a “petty bourgeois atti¬ tude,” accept the viewpoint of the proletariat and develop art as one of the weapons of the working class in the universal struggle for power. Such were the cultural fruits of Stalinism. Earlier in the era the great God Lenin had displayed a distressingly bourgeois admiration for Beethoven and Bernhardt, while his satellite Trots¬ ky, had championed art’s right to be judged by its own laws; but by 1930 Lenin existed only as a mummified substitute for the Deity, and Trotsky in exile was simply a modern counterpart of the wan¬ dering Jew. A schism in the Communist party had fostered a new dispensation, which “assumed that book production can be planned in advance, like the production of textiles or steel,” and prattled glibly about “collective creation” and “the seizure of power in the arts.” Creative independence was tabooed. The new rulers de¬ nounced with vehemence those Slavic Cosmists who vainly sought “a new dazzling road for the planet,” and ridiculed with some justice, I must admit, those mystical youths who desired to “seize the reins of our wind-blown thoughts and ply to the nowhere in our charla- tansky sharabang,” while wooing a vapoury Muse whose essays in Imagism were designed to read equally well from either end. For such nebulous paronomasia, declared the Commissar, there was no place in the proletarian state, and the authorities were prepared, if necessary, to bring recalcitrant scribblers into line with the aid of a little violence. A campaign was launched in the official organ, Pravda, with headlines that screamed of “Literary Sabotage” and “Treason on the Home Front.” Men who claimed an artistic privi¬ lege of “removing the veils from reality” were compelled to exercise that privilege in solitary confinement on the Siberian steppes; men who refused to prostitute their genius for the workers’ cause were driven to the composition of swan songs in their own life-blood. Art was being put on a factory basis, under which material would be collected by reporters, collated by specialists and crystallized by hacks into an offensive blend of Social Realism and Red Roman¬ ticism, portraying the world process as an evolutionary crescendo [10]