HIGHER EDUCATION

This pair of Harvard students, engaging in a face slapping marathon seeking to wrest the honors from Moscow University in Russia, is a challenge to the common sense of taxpayers to seriously question mounting school costs in America. We here find proof that our school curricula and sillp practices, fostered and promoted under the guise of higher education, is a curious alloy of opposites--a little blending of common sense with a wild hysterical foolishness, promoted or sanctioned by the kaisers of "advanced" education.

This face-slapping marathon is a new low in educational folly. It causes one to retch. In the current and natural concomitant of the higher learning, it is hard to revive the pleasant memories of long ago. But there is hope the present trend toward higher spending will bring its own reward.

For the first time in the history of America nearly one third of the national income is being taken by the government: national, state, and local. War comes first in these enormous expenditures. Schools are next. We detect mounting resentment to more taxes.

Taxpayers are learning things about their school systems not taught in civics courses. Face slappers, dope scandals, a mounting incidence of illegitimacy, gold-fish swallowing, prove the current trends in "progressive" education are wrong.

Sadism Gets Boost from School Kaisers

Harvard leads the nation in promoting sadism among its students by allowing such a feature as face-slapping. The younger generation is being taught tolerance of most anything; shocked by very little. The higher education encompasses tolerance of sex experiences before marriage. There is a let down of strong moral feelings against having affairs outside the class room. Adventures of the minds of students no longer are apt to be mild and safe. With the "higher" learning there is implanted the fear of being a bit too stodgy. Schools seem to be producing precocious technicians who lean to believe life is long on treachery, short on rewards. Everywhere, almost, one hears the reiterated gripe against life. Students wallow in private resentments. The flair for evil things some students enjoy is more than a by-product of neurosis.

We Are Being Robbed of Our Tax Money

Many educators complain young people lack militant beliefs. If that is true, higher education is to blame. We are being robbed of taxes to bring forth a docile set of note-takers in the class room. There is no teaching of an absorbing faith in the things which made our country great. Today's generation--and add to this the parents--is ready to conform, either through fear, conviction, or, more likely than not, passivity. Belief in democracy is strong, yes, but inarticulate. We are being bankrupted by the wild spenders promoting the frills and flub-dubbery of new wrinkles in education. Only we, the people, can stop this. Put the promoting type of educator to the rack and screw.

Pray that these lawmakers will have the good sense, then the gumption, to turn down ever mounting school demands. The greatest symbol educators could erect--which they won't erect--is to revive, in the class rooms, not secular panaceas, but a boundless faith in God.