8 The Daily Tar Heel Wednesday, January 7, 1987
latlu
(Ear iteel
94? ear of editorial freedom
Learn from thy
Spawned by internal dissatisfaction
with their own systems, U.S. and
Japanese education officials took a
peek at how each schools their young.
While the two nations complimented
each other, the report clearly stated
that the United States could benefit
from the Japanese example.
Although the studies were non
comparative, conflicting strengths
and weaknesses made the investiga
tion beneficial for both countries. The
pride of American education is its
universities, while the Japanese secon
dary schools are their pillars. Japanese
education is more structured and
offers fewer opportunities for students
to explore than American education.
What the U.S. representatives
found was a "learning society of
formidable dimensions," as Educa
tion Secretary William Bennett des
cribed it. The report said those
achievements stemmed from demand
ing curriculum, heavy parental par
ticipation, tremendous regard for
teachers by society and a strong
student commitment to learning.
These traits are noticeably lacking in
American schools, as many studies
have shown in recent years.
But whereas the Japanese are
superior in efficiency and productiv
ity, the Americans stand out in
nurturing creativity and individual
expression, characteristics Japanese
Sidl0totol
Fairness in media
Maybe a lull in the furor over the
Iranian arms scandal made the media
resort to witch hunting. But respect
lost to sensationalism.
On Dec. 22, the Miami Herald
reported that Lt. Col. Oliver North
current scoundrel, victim or scapegoat
depending upon the point of view
had been treated in 1972 for an
emotional disorder. The next day,
major television networks and news
papers across the country carried the
story.
The stories said North returned
from military duty in Okinawa suffer
ing from emotional distress. (The tour
of duty ranged from 29 days to a year,
depending upon the story read.) His
Marine officers recommended treat
ment, and North was hospitalized.
(The hospitalization was for 10 days
or three weeks, also depending upon
the account.) After his release, North
returned to active duty. According to
military officials, there is no indication
or record of other emotional episodes.
Why should emotional anguish
from 12 years ago become an issue
The Daily
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JIM ZOOK, Editor
Randy Farmer, Managing &toor
KATHY NANNEY, lxjofiuff fctoor
TRACY HILL, News Editor
GRANT PARSONS, University Editor
Linda Montanari, city Editor
DONNA LEINWAND, State and National Editor
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JULIE BRASWELL, Features Editor
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Elizabeth Ellen, Arts Editor
DAN CHARLSON, Photography Editor
neighbor
businessmen claim are lacking in
today's Japanese college graduates.
In his most recent book, The
Reckoning, Pulitzer Prize-winning
author David Halberstam compares
the auto industries of the United
States and Japan. Halberstam attrib
utes the enormous discipline and
communal energy as primary reasons
for the ascendancy of Japanese
industry and technology in the post
World War II era.
While Americans aren't selfish by
nature, American society emphasizes
the Look-Out-for-Number-One men
tality. The communal spirit is secon
dary to individualism and the status
of personal materialism. Americans
have historically been able to afford
this attitude because of luxuries such
as a tremendous wealth of national
resources. Lacking such luxuries, the
Japanese were forced to band
together. The result has been a
thriving business community, bol
stered by some of the world's brightest
students who developed this team
concept while in school.
Bennett tried to dispute the societal
differences between the two nations.
However, those differences cannot be
overlooked, for they go to the soul
of the two nations. But integrating the
best of the Japanese discipline and
rigor could be the best move for
American secondary education.
in North's present controversial
actions? The story would have been
relevant had North suffered emotional
distress while on staff with the
National Security Council, or had the
problem been recurrent.
Public service announcements,
physicians and even media represen
tatives constantly remind the public
that mental and emotional illnesses,
like physical afflictions, can strike
anyone. Americans are told there is
nothing abnormal or freakish about
seeking treatment for the mind as well
as the body. But for North, that
treatment has become a curse, being
dredged from the past to cast insinua
tion upon his current behavior.
Members of the media must con
tinue to be aggressive during investi
gation of the arms sale scandal. But
they also need sensitivity for the fine
distinction between the words "aggres
sive" and "offensive."
Americans are already known to be
cynical about media responsibility and
performance. If they recognize blatant
witch hunting, news gatherers may lose
as much credit as those they attack.
Tar Heel
Reflections
Editor's note: Walter Spearman, editor of
The Daily Tar Heel in 1928 and professor
emeritus of journalism, gave this address at
the 1978 Phi Beta Kappa induction cere
mony. Spearman's message is still very
relevant nine years later, and the DTH felt
it would be appropriate to reprint it at the
beginning of this new semester.
If 1 have a theme tonight, I'd like to call
it "The Mind and the Heart." Obviously,
you are the minds of the University. You
have made; Phi Beta Kappa. You have
achieved academic distinction and you
deserve to be proud. Your parents deserve
to be proud of you and what they have
helped you accomplish.
But tonight I want to ask you one other
question: Where are your hearts?
Back in the 1960s, student hearts were
all hanging out. Students were concerned
with the world about them: war and peace,
racial justice, the rights of labor and the
welfare of the underprivileged, the plight of
the poor and the desperation of the doomed.
I had students who lay down in the streets
of Chapel Hill, obstructing traffic and
leading demonstrations to open theaters and
eating places and hotels to blacks. I had
a student an A student at that who
spent three months in a N.C. jail for seeking
rights for those discriminated against.
Tom Wolfe, a brilliant writer and the
founder of the so-called "New Journalism,"
calls the 1970s the "Me Decade." Encounter
groups, meditation groups, therapy sessions,
Zen and Yoga, primal therapy, sexual
swinging, they all scream "Let's talk about
ME! That's what is important. Never mind
the other fellow. Let's talk about me and
forget the rest of the world. What grade will
1 get? What graduate school will I be
admitted to? What job can I get? What sex
partner can 1 find? What kind of retirement
benefits will my job bring me? Let's think
about me!"
Where are we now? Last year I read an
editorial in The Daily Tar Heel, my old alma
mater, entitled "Students seek status quo."
The editorial quoted the director of the
London School Of Economics as saying self
confident students of the 1960s have been
replaced by the fearful and defensive
students of the 1970s who demand a defense
of the status quo, of existing privileges. And
the student writer concluded: "The student
of the 70s has his hands full simply worrying
about his own future. The idealism of the
student of the '60s, striking out for Utopia,
has fallen by the wayside only to be replaced
by a world of the survival of the fittest."
Several years ago, The New York Times
made a survey of college editors on eight
campuses, from coast to coast, asking what
students were most interested in. One editor
reported, "This campus' 13,000 students
want a place of security in an anxious world
more than an opportunity to make the world
secure." And the UNC editor wrote: "Two
fifths of the students are preoccupied with
trivia, about two-fifths of us sway back from
concern and unconcern and about one-fifth
are involved in something significant,
something larger than ourselves."
ne advantage to teaching here more
than 40 years is that one sees so many
college generations come and go,
usually in like freshman lambs and out like
senior lions. What do they do while they
are here? Is it "a four-year rest period
or coffee break or beer blast between
high school graduation and a lifetime job?
Or is it a period of growth, of maturing,
of new ideas and expanding horizons, of
trying out intellectual wings, of dedication
and service? Are they parasites who sap the
University of its stored up strength? Or do
they revitalize a University that may be
growing tired and add their own new ideas
to the University's accumulation of wisdom?
Students seem more concerned with
grades today and with getting into
graduate school or medical school or law
school than with other people and the
world outside. No one is willing to accept
a C even if it is a well-deserved C for too
little work or too sloppy work.
For the first time in my 43 years of
teaching at Carolina, students call me up
at home at night to explain why they may
have to cut my class the next day or why
they have not been able to finish a paper
on time.
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Ym 1MC Pflmm
on the mind
Walter Spearman
Professor Emeritus
Don't mistake me. It is good to be
concerned about grades. How else can you
get an education? How else can you make
Phi Beta Kappa? But let's not sacrifice the
heart to the mind. Let's not forget concern
and compassion from the 1960s. If the 1970s
is really the "ME Decade," as writer Tom
Wolfe says it is, let us try to temper the
personal concerns for ourselves and for our
future with great outreach to others. "ME!
ME! ME!" can become a selfish scream if
one constantly ignores the needs and
aspirations of others. Let's not cry "Wolfe"
even Tom Wolfe too often. We might
keep the chiding Wolfe from our personal
door by looking outside to see the world
around us. Can we use our Phi Beta Kappa
minds and our human hearts to make a
better world?
fn one or two college generations, the
pendulum swings from apathy to
L activism, from callousness to concern,
from selfishness to unselfishness, from the
scheming mind to the roving heart.
To illustrate that swinging pendulum, let
me take you over to two of my classes in
journalism. I teach a class in book, movie
and play reviewing.. We read Judith Crist's
movie reviews and hear her Call The Sound
of Music the "sound of marshmallows." We
recall the small boy who said: "This book
tells me more about penguins than I want
to know." We remember George Bernard
Shaw's classic remark: "A critic is a man
who leaves no stone unturned." We quote
that infamous line: "An amateur played
Brahms last night. Brahms lost."
In one or two college generations, the
pendulum swings from apathy to activism,
from callousness to concern, from selfishness
to unselfishness, from the scheming mind to
the roving heart.
o
The student who comes to Chapel Hill and
gets a new idea, a new commitment, may puzzle
the family back home or even frighten the
state but he may well be building a
progressive, enlightened future for his state.
Then I teach a course in editorial writing,
and my students write about very serious
subjects: the purpose of education, registra
tion, drop-add, students' rights to vote, the
Honor System, abortions, freedom of the
press, conditions in prison, capital punish
ment, Watergate, the nuclear bomb, ERA
and discrimination against blacks and
women.
One day I asked my students to list five
topics they were sufficiently concerned about
to try to persuade others to their own
convictions. But one girl a very pretty
girl looked bewilderedly out the window.
After class she turned in a blank paper. "But
Mr. Spearman," she said. "I'm just not
concerned about anything. I think every
thing is just fine."
Remember the "new commandment":
"Thou shalt not commit thyself? She
didn't, and she hadn't.
But 1 see commitment on every hand.
Sometimes I even see a student committed
to an academic course, to a term paper that
excites him all through the night before he
has to turn it in, to a new subject that gives
him ideas he never had before, to a particular
professor who may open up challenging new
areas of study that had never interested him
before.
Not all commitments are to great public
causes. They may be to a superior basketball
team. They may be commitments to a girl,
but commitments that belie the old Playboy
philosophy that girls, like any good acces
sory, are detachable and disposable. They
may be commitments to become the best
doctor or lawyer or nuclear physicist you
audi heart
are capable of being. They may be com-
mitments to open your sorority or your
fraternity to all individuals, regardless of
race, creed or color.
Commitments come in various sizes.
What is a small commitment to one person ,
may be a large and meaningful one to,
another, the refusal to go along with popular,
stereotypes, the determination to think for
yourself, the courage to be a nonconformist
in the midst of conformity. The student who
comes to Chapel Hill and gets a new idea,
a new commitment, may puzzle the family
back home or even frighten the state
but he may well be building a progressive,
enlightened future for his state.
The "hippies" used to say, "Do your
thing," but would add: "Have a thing to
do." "Build, baby, build" was always a better
slogan than "Burn, baby, burn."
Oh, there was apathy back in the 60s
as well as dedicated commitment. And there
is commitment today as well as a tendency
to "look out for No. 1 ." Our task as "thinking
students," as men and women with Phi Beta
Kappa minds, is to use our minds in
conjunction with our hearts to create the
full man, the complete woman, the felicitous
combination of mind and heart.
If this were to be a "Last Lecture", I'd
like to wrap it all in a box, and, like the
boxes we used to send abroad for the
starving, write CARE on it in large letters
CARE. Care about your academic work.
(You obviously do or you wouldnt be
here tonight.) Care about your fellow
students. Care about the world in which you
live and the people who live in it with you,
even those you have never seen. If you need
a motto for tomorrow, change it from "Thou
shalt not commit thyself" to the one word:
care.
Neither the faculty nor the administration
nor your parents should ask you to avoid
controversy. Rather, we should ask you and
eternally encourage you to care about
something and to care enough to become
involved.
Ni
'ow even a Last Lecture has its last
paragraph: I wanted to pass on to
you the words of the two professors
who meant the most to me in the 20s when
I was a student, when I, too, was under 30.
Their commitment shone round their heads
like halos and to me they were, and are,
Chapel Hill and the University. We all need
our heroes and these were mine. Let them
be your heroes too, or find new heroes of
your own.
Playwright Paul Green once said: "Life
is like a tree forever growing." So may it
prove to you.
And University President Frank Graham
once wrote: "Where and when men are free,
the way of progress is not subversion, the
respect for the past is not reaction, and the
hope of the future is not revolution, where
majority is without tyranny, the minority
without fear, and all people have hope of
building together a nobler America in a freer
and fairer world."
When I was a student, Paul Green gave
me a volume of his plays. On the flyleaf
he wrote: "To Walter Spearman, with a
belief in his ultimate triumph."
My last word to you as a teacher is this:
"I have a belief in your ultimate triumph."
And I care. Develop and cultivate and use
your mind but don't sacrifice your heart.