Kappa Delta Pi, through its publications including The Educational Forum and the KDP Record, has not shied away from taking on important educational, philosophical, political, and societal issues of various eras. A sampling of articles from KDP’s past shows the Society has attempted to remain relevant and a thought-leader on a variety of topics:
Race and Schools
Interaction between America’s diverse cultures and races always has played an important role in defining the nation’s educational system, and throughout U.S. history, schools have reflected society’s struggles in this area. As early as 1949, Kappa Delta Pi was examining the issue on behalf of its members.
Writer Nettie Wysor of Dublin, Virginia, submitted an article titled, “Co-operation across the color line,” in which she challenged KDP members with the idea that “only wholehearted co-operation across the color line can bring to both races peace, friendship, and good will” (The Educational Forum 1949, 93).
Wysor’s four-part essay noted that many “constructive minds” of philosophers, scientists, educators, churchmen and “men of good will everywhere are giving all that they have of brain and brawn to the solution of political and social problems” in the United States (89). But powers of lethargy and indifference were still greater than the good will which Wysor believed existed to bring black and white people together in schools and communities across the nation.
Wysor was direct: “We may as well face the facts: We have sinned against the Negro; we have exploited him; we have underestimated his abilities; we have taken our superiority and position and dominant race for granted; and on this supposition have subjected him to unethical, unchristian discriminatory treatment both in the courts of law and in the world of business” (90).
Wysor said Negro citizens of America wanted equality in education, politics and industry, but cited major challenges that remained in the Deep South. She challenged the idea that segregation as practiced in the South “is not always a term for common sense” (92).
While groundbreaking, some of her commentary reflected the lack of sophistication among whites about their fellow black citizens, and spoke in paternalistic terms when describing educational opportunities for black students.
Race was also forefront in a series of four articles The Forum published in 1965 during the heart of the U.S. Civil Rights movement. Well-known author Dr. Maxine Greene took up the issue of “The teacher and the Negro child: Invisibility in the school.”
Greene attempted to explore what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had described as “a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’” that effected black children and adults. In essence, Greene asserted that black children may feel, as author James Baldwin called it, “faceless” in the classroom and as a result, “fail in mastering elementary skills” needed for later life success (The Educational Forum 1965, 275).
Greene also wrote extensively about the impact of poverty on young students and the result: “The teacher, then, confronts ambiguities and perplexities of all sorts when he takes the responsibility for a Negro child. He realizes that he will be hard put to motivate and teach if there is little feeling of self-regard or worth” (277).
Also during 1965, Dr. Joseph S. Roucek, a writer and political science professor, took up the issue of American Indians in a provocatively titled piece, “The most oppressed race in the United States: The Indian” (The Educational Forum 1965). Roucek quoted U.S. Senator Hubert H. Humphrey of Minnesota who declared the 400,000 Indians “were the most oppressed minority group in the United States” (477).
Roucek’s essay took up familiar issues of struggles for American Indians to hold onto their own personal land, inequities of reservations, but also educational challenges. He said it was clear most Indian tribe leaders in the United States agreed that education was a key factor to assisting young people in finding lives away from the reservations.
“The whole history of the efforts of the federal government to ‘educate’ the Indians is rather sordid, since the Federal Bureau of Indian Affairs has often failed to interest the Indians in education and self-improvement and has come to be looked upon as a ‘father figure’ which would solve the Indians’ problems,” Roucek wrote (478).
Early educational efforts were focused on assimilation of Native Americans to new cultural norms, Roucek noted, and were further complicated by “how to relate the concepts of cultural pluralism to total assimilation” (482).
Roucek said, “the continuous state of conflict” that existed around issues of race provided further challenges. “This is especially true in regions (of the United States) where the color line is not sharply drawn, and where there are no absolute prescriptions marking off the role shared by other citizens and the role of Americans shared only by those with colored skin” (481).
Roucek said under such circumstances, “the Indian can never be certain of his status or sure of his welcome”—perhaps a factor contributing to historically high drop-out rates among Native American students.
Student Survival amidst War and Destruction
Both World War I and II took place during the beginning years of Kappa Delta Pi. These major human conflicts could not help but impact education in general and students in particular. KDP looked at the impact of war on students from two separate angles on the pages of The Educational Forum.
In March 1950, safely removed by half a decade from the close of the calamitous World War II, the journal gave space to an essay written by Lotte Beran, an Austrian exchange student studying at the time at the New Jersey State Teachers College at Trenton. She was in America under provisions of the “Overseas Teacher Relief Fund of 1948” (The Educational Forum 1950, 339). She had survived three years of hopelessness amidst the deadly Auschwitz concentration camp where she endured torture and unspeakable violence, as well as forced labor in a German munitions factory.
Beran said she wrote not to provide a comprehensive look at life inside Nazi-created concentration camps, but instead “to show how it is possible to extract from so terrible an experience something positive” (339). She said one German children’s poem summed up her experience best of all:
| |
“I was in hell, I lay in the tomb,
I went down to the deepest depths.
The light was veiled to me,
A feeble glimmer,
The light that could be so clear and radiant.
Evil spirits surrounded me,
They tore at me, they tortured me—
They could not shake faith.
(While they could mangle the body.)
Faith became ‘Eternal Knowing,’
Though my heart is rent with wounds. . .” |
Beyond near constant fear for her life—or for the cruel manner of her death—Beran noted that education and thought also were annihilated inside the camps. “All facilities were to destroy enlightenment and goodness in people,” she wrote. “By rendering the most primitive parts of daily life enormously difficult, the great part of thought was bound to material things” (340).
Beran said she felt that “whosoever had experienced the fear of death so intensely, had felt the greatest grief and yet had come out again, has the duty to aid in the deliverance from evil, in the shaking up of mankind to its awakening” (343).
She cautioned, “We should not forget what we learned so intensely during this time” (343).
Some of what was learned from the scourge of the Nazi and Fascist movements of World War II were explored by Dr. I. L. Kandel in a 1941 edition of The Forum, just before the United States formally entered the war. In his essay, “Let there be darkness: The Nazi wave of the future in education,” Kandel attacked aggressive efforts by German invaders in occupied portions of Europe and their systematic cleansing of libraries and universities—particularly in France and Poland.
Kandal accurately proclaimed: “The advance of learning is incompatible with the principles of a dictatorship” (Educational Forum 1941, 69).
“In this hour, when the threat of the wave of the future already heralds a period of darkness over Europe, it would be well for all Americans and not those of the teaching profession alone to recall the fundamental ideal on which our system of education rests,” Kandel wrote. “Our earliest universities were established to spread light and truth”—a light and truth he believed the Nazi regime planned to extinguish (72).
A year later in 1942, just six months after America had suffered the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbor, Dr. Lawrence A. Averill took up the issue of how the war was impacting children and schools in the middle of the European battlefield.
Averill’s essay starts with a telling scene in 1939 depicting more than one million British school children being taken out of class and normal instruction in order to learn proper air raid evacuation procedures. The coming aerial assault on England by Nazi forces would prove the training valuable.
Eventually, thousands upon thousands of British mothers and their infants and school-aged children heeded the government’s warnings and fled London and other major cities for the relative safety of rural areas.
“Everything was disrupted,” Averill reported. “Schools, welfare centers, medical services, as well as family life itself” (242).
He added, “The effects of air raids and bombing upon hundreds of thousands of children cannot be said to be other than demoralizing in the extreme . . . (the children) have become, like their elders, amazingly inured to the peril that swoops down upon them from the skies . . . London’s children have developed a calm and steadfastness, a poise and a self-discipline that are nothing short of marvelous to witness” (244).
Averill ended by acknowledging that the long-term effects of such danger could not now be known, but asked teachers and educators everywhere to continue to keep the children of Europe in their prayers.
Motion Pictures and Education
The growing popularity of motion pictures (soon to be followed by the advent of television and later the Internet) brought KDP commentary in The Educational Forum from Eric Johnston in March 1950 (in the form of the text of his speech to the Annual Education Conference of the Carnegie Foundation in October 1949). Johnston, serving at the time as the President of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), issued a plea for human values in motion pictures.
Johnston argued that because a major goal of democracy and education was the creation of “a free and inquiring mind,” motion pictures could play a positive role in promoting such literacy (263). He noted that schools and the film industry both were familiar with attempts to censor or restrict information shared with students and audiences.
“The American motion picture industry isn’t taking threats to its freedom lightly,” he declared. “We are going to fight back at the threat of official censorship wherever it exists, wherever it is indicated, wherever it is symptomatic. We have more than ourselves to consider” (The Educational Forum 1950, 263–64).
Johnston shared that the MPAA was working closely with rural school districts across Nebraska to use films to help broaden the experience and knowledge of students there—some in schools with fewer than 50 students. The four-year effort, coordinated with education experts at the University of Nebraska, made more than 1,000 films available to schools in the state.
Results of the effort indicated that students were retaining more knowledge of subjects in their curriculum after watching companion films to their texts and that teacher colleges in Nebraska were developing education courses for the appropriate use of film in schools.
“I rejoice in your renewed assurances that you welcome the motion picture as an ally in the enlightenment of man and in the enrichment of his life,” Johnston said. “Trust us to stand with you to make out of the child and of the youth of today the whole man of tomorrow—to vest them with challenging, questioning minds girded against untruths, devoted to virtues of decency and morality, and above all, forever vigilant of liberty and human dignity” (266).
SOURCES:
Averill, L. A. 1942. What is the war doing to Europe’s children? The Educational Forum 6(3): 241–45.
Beran, L. 1950. A year in a concentration camp. The Educational Forum 14(3): 339–45.
Greene, M. 1965. The teacher and the Negro child: ‘Invisibility’ in the school. The Educational Forum 29(3): 275–80.
Johnston, E. 1950. Motion pictures and education. The Educational Forum 14(3): 261–66.
Kandal, I. L. 1941. Let there be darkness: The Nazi wave of the future in education. The Educational Forum 6(1): 69–72.
Roucek, J. S. 1965. The most oppressed race in the United States: The Indian. The Educational Forum 29(4): 477–-85.
Wysor, N. 1949. Co-operation across the color line. The Educational Forum 14(1): 89–93. |
