University of Wisconsin Madison - Badger Yearbook (Madison, WI)

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20 CONCERNING EDUCATION As advocate of an organic arci ally learned that no architects our system of education stands. Nor great art ot any kind. Youth Our system or education in general science, is a coward afraid to look within who does so. With infinite tact and patience textbook and class complacent inertia ii not permanent sterility in the realm ot imagination where imagina tion becomes action. 1 believe vve are all born either young or old. We see students, young in years, already old and others, well along in years, young as ever. So we may believe that youth is a quality and this quality is characterized by love, sincerity, determination and courage. All or these characteristics are conspicuously absent in academic circles, even in thought. As for these qualities in action -no action, as academic, is possible. It is not even properly thinkable. It is not “being done. Why wonder, then, that we are, the world over, acknowledged to bean un creative people? Inventive, ingenious, but in no true sense whatever, creative. Nearly everything we have as either institution or gentility we got from the top down that is to say by borrowing or accepting it ready made. We are cleverly capable of adapt-ing or adopting or transplanting or transposing anything or everything because we are specialists of long standing in all these forms of brokerage. We are the world’s best broker, but we can neither govern, build, draw, sculp, nor play from the ground upward, that is to say from within outward. We makeshift so. naturally, we fear the radical and call “conservative the lid-sitter the stand-patter the pompous “flu-flu bird who would “hold everything where it is: he would protect the fixture. The frame work of our entire civilization being a futive fixture like some chandelier precariously hanging from the ceiling. We have a sad of the jitters when anyone approaches the pome of fixment to learn how the thing where it hangs.

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19 for determining the moisture content by other than slow and unsatisfactory methods. This obstacle has been re' moved by the Forest Products Laboratory by a recent invention called the “blinker, which is a simple and eco-nomical portable moisture content meter. Its effective range is from 7 to 24 per cent, corresponding closely to the ordinary range of wood-moisture content. It has received its name from two flashing neon bulbs that indicate relative wetness and dryness. Pulp and Paper IN the research of pulp and paper, the principal objective is to make the United States independent of foreign lands in its paper needs. The significance of this objective is clearly indicated when the imports of pulp and paper for last year of approximately $250,000,000, translated into terms of employment, are found to be equivalent to fulltime jobs for 47,000 American citizens, willing and anxious to work. By the adoption of methods developed by research much of this business may be recaptured. The study of the various American woods as pulp and paper raw materials will be greatly accelerated by new facilities in the form of a pulp and paper research laboratory occupying six floors at one end of the building. This will ultimately include grinder equipment, a digester tower 40 feet square, beating and refining apparatus, and an experimental paper machine with all moving parts under precise control. This permits the measurement and control of various operating variables that affect the quality of the paper. Many reductions in the cost of production and the development of good grades of paper from low-priced raw materials give promise for expansion in the paper-making industry. Conclusion THE effects of the Laboratory's work are being felt constantly in better standards for lumber, more economical production, the elimination of waste, and better service to the user—all foreshadowing a revival of forest production and markets when our present economic difficulties are past. Jenks Cameron, of the Institute for Government Research, a non-governmental organization, says, At a conservative estimate American industries are today saving 15 million dollars annually by virtue of the work of the Laboratory. And this in only a beginning. This estimate, furthermore, does not take into account savings effected by improved methods of forest management. If Mr. Cameron's published estimate is approximately correct (and it is low in comparison with other surveys), the Forest Products Liboratory is paying annual dividends of $27 for every dollar invested in its operations at the current rate of appropriations. This research is not simply a battle of wood against competing materials, but rather a systematic program to further the use of woods to the best advantages for such purposes as can not be better fulfilled by other materials. With the new facilities and the present recognition of the United States Forest Products Liboratory as the authority in wood research great advancement in the use of woods and the conservation of our forests should be forthcoming. The J cw Forest Products Libor

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21 But I like the noble word “radical. It means of the root or to the root. The radical must know things from the ground up. He must know how and why the thing is as it is because he knows that life can be kept living only by growing. Growth is his passionate concern. Iking radical he is therefore truly conservative and is the only man to be trusted with the life of anything or able to invest the changes natural to organic growth in either law or edu-cation. The radical alone sees that life itself is growth, and to avoid the agony of disestablishment he would pre-pare for it in any necessary form he would make. ■ Now popular education, being from the top down, is not radical in any sense. ■ As already said “education is a coward where life or action is concerned and cowardly to such an extent that in all forms of self expression other than classical conformity or money-getting we seem to have no soul to call our own nor do we seem to be very deeply interested in one of any kind. ■ We are pretty comfortable, thank you, and fairly rich by way of what has been developed by way of the other fellow. ■ The history of what he did is with us as our popular “art and we live in houses built by the dead for the living—practice all forms of obsolescence from an antique Jewish money-changers' money-system and the old fuedal system of landlord and tenant to a wholly subservient religion, politics and art. ■ Too much comfort seems to have murdered what passion young souls might have known and has done so by advice of counsel “Education. ■ But signs of revolt are not lacking. Going about the country from coast to coast and from North to South pleading the cause of architecture, even in our universities 1 find healthy resentment growing against arm-chair education. Rebellion is as necessary as amity if life is to go on worthwhile as any affair of our own. Rebellion is necessary if the organic law of natural change is to be acknowledged and made a feature of our establishment in order that we may not continually live in fear, tortured by economic anxiety, frustrate from beginning to end. If we aim at St. Mark's as Exhibited in the Frank Lloyd Wright Show at the Wisconsin Union Gallery