Applied Knowledge

The Freshmen filing past the long card-strewn tables in Memorial Hall today have a hard year ahead of them. They will be expected to absorb carefully and thoroughly one quarter of a liberal college education at a time when most of the outside pressures on them are neither liberal nor educational.

Most of the noteworthy news events of the past summer had this in common: they lacked the quality of reasonable tolerance which characterizes a liberal education. The polemical breakdown of the Kersong truce talks in-korea, the bluff and bluster that have marked the negations over Iranian oil, the wild demonstrations at the Communist youth festival in Berlin, and the continuing hysteria over "subversive elements" that marks certain elements of public and legislative opinion do not create a good atmosphere for studying.

It would be hard enough for a student simply to withdraw from unreasonable reality into classrooms and libraries, with the present prospect of military service and war hanging over him. It is many times harder for him to take his learning and apply it to the unreasonable, uneducated world which is pushing him around. Yet that is what he must do if there is to be any end to the unreasonableness of this summer. That is the primary concern at today's registration.