Some years ago Dr. Elmer Homrighausen, a Princeton professor, gave me a helpful idea that has served me well ever since. He pointed out in a lecture that most counselors and psychiatrists who write books of case studies tend to amplify their successes and minimize their failures. This is only human, of course, especially when a man is writing a book telling the rest of us how to do it. Naturally he wants to make the best possible case for his own case study.
The reason why this has all been so helpful to me is that my own role as counselor and guide has ended up almost every time in abject failure. I don’t seem to get the successes these other men write about (which is probably why no one ever asks me to write a book on counseling and guidance). Some of my recent forays into this field will illustrate my thesis. For the life of me I hardly know where to begin with the following:
CASE NO. 1. Our teen-ager, a sophomore in high school, takes a course entitled “World History and American History.” I would guess that the class has to move pretty fast to cover that subject in a year. Her teacher has a reputation for being a front-runner, avant-garde, and one expects that she is “up” on all the latest methods.
The students, according to the style of our day, do independent studies. The last independent study reported on by our teen-ager was a girl who researched the Broadway play Hair. Since this is a family magazine I will not review Hair for you, but I would like to suggest that it is impossible to report on Hair to a high-school class without engaging in what people used to call “indecency.”
How such a thing gets into a history class evades my mind. It might be sociology; it might be drama; it is more likely comparative anatomy. If by a stretch of the imagination it comes under the general heading of contemporary history, I still squirm helplessly over the whole educational environment that makes such an exercise even a possibility in a classroom.
So what advice does one give to his daughter? How does one support a student’s respect for her teachers while trying to voice utter dismay over what the teacher is producing in the classroom? How does one get hold of the deeper problems of the attitudes, methods, and pseudo-sophistication that make all this possible?
CASE NO. 2. I have learned from a printed bulletin, published by a school, that two teachers are beginning a course entitled: “Man—A Course of Study.” The course has been put together by “teachers, psychologists, and anthropologists,” and it is to be taught to sixth-graders. Let me quote from the bulletin.
In exploring the question, “What is human about human beings?” the first half of the course contrasts the life cycles and behaviors of three animals—the salmon, the herring gull, and the baboon to man. These studies lead students to question the significance of generational overlap and parental care, innate and learned behavior, group structure and communication, environmental adjustment, and the relevance of these to the varying life styles of animal species.
What a bunch of sixth-graders they must be! But the quotation goes on.
It is man’s ability to symbolize and his gift of self-awareness that allow him to be a cultural creature. We examine the social behavior of the Netsilik Eskimos, of the Canadian Artic [sic] in depth because their society is small and technologically simple, yet universal in the problems it faces. Netsilik society, too, is different enough from our own to reveal the extent to which our behavior is shaped by the society in which we live.
If the above quotation concerning new and exciting approaches to education makes sense to you, then I can’t help you. The loss of the idea of man’s being a child of God has repercussions we do not yet even suspect.
CASE NO. 3. I fell into a conversation with some kind of an assistant professor, who also directs dormitory life, and one of his students who has the reputation of outstanding scholarship. The question before the house was the influx, more or less, of women into the men’s dormitories. The general picture seems to be that these women come by invitation and stay as long as they like. It may be argued that what they do on long weekends is an expression of love, love, love, but I got the notion from the conversation that other women happened by to satisfy passions somewhat less than the grand passion.
What developed in the conversation was: (a) the inability of the administration to do anything about it, and (b) the conclusion that the administration had no right to interfere with the private life of a student. Meanwhile, I discovered that this student could not graduate until he had passed a swimming test of fifty yards. So my mind reeled. A first-rate university cannot interfere with fornication in its dormitories, but can make a man learn to swim—and the man doesn’t like water.
I wonder about the self-respect of college administrators who are perfectly aware of what is going on, evade it or countenance it, or even justify it, and then go on about their business of “higher” education. I hear a great deal of talk about educating the whole man. Apparently in our day this does not include the instincts or activity of a gentleman. What is even more confusing is that the college administrators themselves are gentlemen; they believe that some things are better than others (knowing how to swim is better than not knowing how to swim); but they feel they are in no position to say so or to insist on it.
CASE NO. 4. Two seminary students told me recently that they were instructed, in certain classes, not to use the Bible as a support for the positions they took. They assured me that when one man in the class argued from Scripture he was laughed to scorn. If you find this unbelievable, let me quote from a good book, which is not the Bible, The Life and Death of Dietrich Bonhoeffer by Mary Bosanquet. Some people classify Bonhoeffer as a liberal, and if he is then what he says about his American theological education is even more striking:
A theology is not to be found here.… They chatter till all is blue without any factual foundation or any criteria of thought becoming visible.… They intoxicate themselves with liberal and humanistic expressions, laugh at the fundamentalists, and basically they are not even a match for them. Often it goes through and through me when here in a lecture they dismiss Christ, and laugh outright when a word of Luther’s is quoted on the forgiveness of sin [Harper & Row, 1969, p. 83].
As a counselor I hardly know where to begin.
ADDISON H. LEITCH
