Douglas College

P.O. Box 2503, New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
New Westminster Campus - Telephone: 521-4851

 

February 17, 1975

The Editor
The Madhatter
Douglas College

Dear Sir:

To dismiss a liberal education as a middle-class luxury seems
strangely ironic (if not downright hypocritical) in a society as
cluttered as it is with chrome trimmed automobiles, dish washers,
wall to wall broadloom, colored ranges and refrigerators, fly-now-
pay-later vacations, expensive fashions, and the omnipotent color
TV set.

To promote vocational training as an alternative to liberal
education is as logical as offering bread to someone who seeks a
light.

The high incidence of boredom among the employed (executives
and professionals as well as the assembly line factory worker),
attested to by personnel agencies, manpower counsellors, mental health
workers, and magazine writers, points to the folly of limiting educa-
tion to vocational proficiency.

William Lyan Phelps, a member of the English department at
Yale before World War II, put it this way:--

"The best insurance against old age and dis-
ability is an interesting mind. In my life
of professional teaching, I have never
endeavored to make young men more efficient.
I have tried to make them more interesting.
I like to hang pictures on the walls of the
mind. I like to make it possible for a man
to live with himself so that he will not be
bored with himself."

The community college could play a vital role in enhancing
mental fitness for the future. Perhaps national and provincial
budgeters could be persuaded to find funds for a mental fitness cam-
paign as a change from all the concern with physical fitness? Perhaps
those who condemn the able-bodied recipient of welfare or U.I.C.
benefit, could pause and consider that in contemporary society, it
is more significant for survival to be able minded?

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