THE CADRE, TUES., NOV. 5, 1973 Page 5

luiMAN, I DON'T EVEN CARE " ABOUT ATH Y MRE

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of organic illness and I generated out of the Hege— I certain types of medicine. lian Absolute (Tower of ‘“ I would be delighted to know Babel?) as the Wittgen

if professor Rahman has in Steinian fly—bottle un- fact established that there corked. As an empirical

is such a relationship. assertion this seems no If he has and if he will less (9r more) arbitrary inform me bf it. My job .than the professors. COuld be made so much Does too much high easier. In the meantime f19wn philosophy

we all have our favourite ‘ rurn the Cadre? books, books we would be * .fl delighted to recommend to What about a little

‘ our.friends. (2) About 10W blown PSYChOlogy? the Philosophical: I do not know how professor Rahman has come to know with such certainty what the goals and 'propér' objects of philosophy are. I would however, in denial Of what I interpret the professor to be implying, assert that there has been every bit as much interest-

I am at a loss to dis- cover how the professor determines sense and why he feels he can term the pre- mises of what appears to me‘ to be a mixed hypothetical conditional argument. 'Major' and 'Minor' ?

More fundamentally, I am distressed that the prof— essor seems unable to

penetrate beyond the lin- guistic and logical aspects —of Mr. Dalton's confused presentation to what I

see as the genuine philos— Opth preoccupations it attempts to express.

Ken Butler

ing and useful philosophy

Dear Editor, '

1rr Pridmore stigmatizes me first as a "lax utopi- an liberal" and second as a "reactionary conservati- ve apologist" before cast- ing me into the pit with those misguided wretches who believe that man is in- trinsically good. (He is , quite wrong in this‘latter ascription. No one has a dimmer or darker image of human nature than yours truly.) Then he ends up agreeing with me complete- ly ear almost.

Mr. Pridmore thinks that "the grading system has ma- ny demerits" and that exams‘ "measure only how well one can cram." He urges "cutt- ing down on exams,"."enco- uraging student research," "increasing contact of te- acher and student," and ’ "making our grading system more flexible." No argume- .nt. This is what I preach- ed, by name or implication in my article. This is wh- at I have been trying to practice in my own courses. I also agree fully with the need, on the part of both students and teachers, for "stated and implied commi- tments" and the setting of "Concrete goals."

Where Mr. Pridmbre and I ‘ part company is his convi- ction that because "the fl- eSh is weak" students must be'bullied, by various egr- egious carrot—and-stick de- Vlces, into doing what the deademic Establishment th— lhks id good for them He mlsses one of the main -- and best documented -- p0- }nts of my article, which is that these coercive te- chniques certainly do not COntribute significantly? t0 learning. Learning, I have alWays supposed, is

the fundamental reason why we are all here at the un- iversity.

No amount of lamentation about the laziness, disho- nesty and general depravie ty of mankind will alter the obvious fact that the ,orthodox system of univer- sity evaluation is a dism- al failure, both as a mea— sure of educational attai— nment and a predictor of career success. Mr. Prid- more concedes as much, al- though he waffles by sugg— esting that cramming and "other student survival tv tactics" are a good intro- duction to the business wo- rld. It could be argued wi- th similar logic that cam- us politics was good trai- ning for the Watergate co— nspirators. .

In his obsession with au- thority control, and exte— rnal dicipline, Mr. Prid— more assumes that student centered courses have to be "bird-courses". He takes it for granted that unstr- uctured, non—competitive courses "give (students) nothing to do and no rea— son to do it" and that a course employing self-ev- aluation must_by definition

, be a "do-nothing" course.

My own reading and ex- perience leads me to a qui- te different conclusion: that in the final analusis, a learning situation or "c- ourse" will be just a mean- ingful to each individual student as he or she wishes to make it. The plain les- son of educational psych- ology, as evidenced by the work of B.F. Skinner, Jean Piaget, John Holt, Jerome

Bruner,and other , is that ,

a student must be receptive to learning if it is to be implanted. Coercive learn-

ing of material of any de— gree of profundity will ne- ver take hold, because the inner man will resist it. To paraphrase the old rur- al addage, "you can lead a student to the waters of k knowledge but you can't ma- ke him drink the stuff."

It is not easy for Canad- ians, trained to believe i in original sin and the sa- nctity of the work ethic, to jettison these time- honoured but psychological- ly inadequate concepts. Yet they are going to have to make this difficult readj- ustment if universities and» other schools are to give students the educational experiences\they must ha- ve to COpe effectively with an increasingly impersonal, exploitative, and predatory society.

Don M. Creiger

Dear Editor,

I'm not sure why I write this - I guess I'm mixed - up an.I figure that you should be able to help and maybe if some\other people

. feel this way, they might ‘use your paper to help me and other people like me.

I consider myself average

but I guess I'm different because I see my fellow students and life as sup- erficial. I, like you, ha- ve questions. My biggest question and disappointme- nt is, why isn't there a, response to what you're saying? We have Christians on campus, DON'T WE? We ha- ve people who live democr- acy, DON'T WE? We have pe- ople who are happy, DON'T WE? We have people who fi-

COD'f, pg. 9

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