Youth in Crisis - Responsibility of Schools

Citation preview

YOUTH IN CRISIS The Responsibility

ef the Schools

CHARLES HABIB MALIK WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR. WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW FRANKE. GAEBELEIN EDITED BY

Peter C. Moore

THE SEABURY PRESS NEW YORK

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, for permission to use copyrighted material from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man.

Copyright© 1966 by The Seabury Press, Incorporated Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 66-22997 545-167-Hm-2-1.5 Printed in the United States of America Second Printing

Preface

The contents of this book originally were a series of papers on the topic "Youth's Crisis in a Changing World-The Responsibility of the Schools" given at the Eighth National Con­ ference on Religion in Independent Education at the Shoreham Hotel, Washington, D.C., October 21-23, 1965. The conference convened under the sponsorship of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools, a seventy-year-old voluntary association for the improvement of religious education and the extension of spiritual concern in independent schools. Co-chairmen for the conference were Mr. Richard H. Mc­ Feely, Headmaster, George School, Pennsylvania, and Miss Anne Healy, Headmistress, Roland Park Country School, Mary­ land. To them and to their hard-working committees, we ex­ press our appreciation. Three hundred heads of schools, teachers, chaplains and parents from 30 states assembled in the nation's capital for the two-day meeting. While speakers were chosen within a broadly Christian con­ text, no attempt was made to present a solidly unified viewpoint. The reader will therefore note sharp divergences of opinion which, although expressed without rancor or bitterness, illustrate the lack of unanimity on this crucial subject. For this reason it would be quite impossible for an editor to agree with all the opinions expressed.

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Preface

The Council for Religion in Independent Schools gratefully acknowledges a generous gift which has made this publication possible. We offer it in the sincere hopes that concerned people may be helped, as so many of us who attended the conference were, to understand the nature of the crisis and to be guided to those resources which are available to meet it. Young people are news. Their sheer numbers have created a youth culture. Money, freedom, and an almost universal estrange­ ment from adult society have made them the targets of massive advertising campaigns and endless reports. There is hardly an American magazine that has not parlayed this upsurge of interest into handsome profit by a special cover story on youth today. The chapters which follow in this book are unique, however, in the rising volume of youth literature. For they are written neither for the popular audience, which delights in generaliza­ tions and shocking statistics, nor for those with obvious vested interests in the young, but for those who see themselves in the ambiguous position of being at once the most directly involved with youth and at the same time the least directly responsible for youth-namely educators. Our society has adopted the ques­ tionable assumption that while the home and the church share a responsibility for the development of personality, values, and faith, the school is responsible only for the development of knowl­ edge. The three hundred educators who sacrificed time from busy schedules to attend the Eighth National Conference on Religion in Independent Education represent a healthy opposition to this dichotomy. Together with an encouraging number of others in the independent school movement, they continue to demonstrate a lively concern that education be for persons as well as for brains. Most vividly this concern is illustrated in their schools by the growing participation in voluntary work projects outside the school community, the enthusiastic support of student religious conferences like those sponsored by the Council for Religion in

Preface

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Independent Schools and the Northfield League, and by the high degree of commitment to academic competence in the teaching of religion within the regular school curriculum. This book attempts to convey something of the vitality of this national conference. How well it does this, particularly in the light of a divergence of views between the speakers, will have to be judged by the reader. For this reason we have edited and included in this volume the vigorous spontaneous debate which took place between Dr. Charles Habib Malik and Mr. William Sloane Coffin, Jr. It appears as Chapter 4. Unfortunately, in the interest of size, this necessitated the omission of much of the discussion that followed each seminar paper. Some felt that the conflict between Dr. Malik and Mr. Coffin was more apparent than real. Where does the stress lie in com­ municating the Christian Faith: in the "treasure" or in the "earthen vessel"? Whose is the crisis, anyway: youth's or ours? Which gives a more accurate picture of the world: "realism" or "utopianism"? Should one emphasize the timelessness of the sacred, or the contemporaneity of the secular? Where does one start: micro-ethics or macro-politics? Each reader must conclude for himself where the answers to these and other questions lie. But if as is so often the case, the truth lies not in a compromise of the extremes, but at both ex­ tremes, then these chapters affirm our need in this generation for deep roots in God and broad branches to the world. If this be the case, then the secret of a truly fruitful education lies in the assumption of this dual responsibility.

New York City May, 1966

Peter C. Moore, Director Council for Religion in Independent Schools

Contents

Preface

V

PART I: THE CRISIS FACING YouTH

1 The Crisis Defined by Charles Habib Malik 2 The Crisis Revealed by William Sloane Coffin, Jr. 3 The Crisis Accepted by William Stringfellow 4 The Crisis in Our Midst: Discussion with Conference Speakers 5 The Crisis Resolved by Charles Habib Malik 6 The Christ of Crisis by Frank E. Gaebelein

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21

35 43 53

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PART II: THE Crusis IN OuR ScHOOLs

7 Parental Equivocation and Student Moral Standards by S. Scott Bartchy 8 The Religious Curriculum and Student Skepticism by Christopher M. Brookfield 9 School Rules and Student Expulsion by Alvord M. Beardslee

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91 101

10 School Chapel and Student Rebellion by Foster Q. Doan 11

Sexual Practice and Student Confusion by Churchill]. Gibson, Jr. 12 The Role of the Teacher and the Student's Inner Conflicts by Barclay L. Palmer

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113 119

PART III: STUDENTS FACE THE CRISIS

13 The Crisis as We Saw It by Roy W. Yowl, Helen Shoemaker Rea, and George W. Renwick

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Reading Suggestions

141

About the Contributors

145

The Call

"I am come that they might have life and have it to the full." -Jesus Christ

In both school and community relationships, the student of today is involved in complex decisions which often overwhelm him. The school must give more leadership in this turbulent era of shaken standards and uncer­ tainty. This leadership must be rooted in the enduring values of life, and must be so presented that young people will accept them and strive to live by them. Their enthusiastic response is essential in meeting the needs of the world today. We must find more effective ways of communicating to this generation the strength and dignity which Chris­ tian principles impart to life. Much that we have counted on in the past seems to be inadequate to this task. Our faith in the church and in religious curricula, our dependence on parental standards and school ideals, and our reliance on conventions of society and the dic­ tates of the human heart have not been able to combat the instability, moral confusion, and aimlessness so wide­ spread among young people. The independent schools face searching questions. Are we ourselves as teachers and administrators really 1

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committed to the best values men live by? Are we giving more than lip service to winning the allegiance of our students to these values? Are we facing realistically the perils of an afHuent society which include complacency, apathy, and lack of concern for others? Are we helping students to discover both the source and creative role of authority-human and divine? Are we helping students to discover the tremendous resources in spiritual renewal, a sense of vocation and personal commitment? This National Conference of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools provides us with an opportunity to examine these problems. We are encouraged to under­ take this task because of the many young people who have found sure ground on which to stand. We shall seek together God's will for us, our schools, and our students. Our hope is to become more and more the kind of persons through whom young people can find mean­ ing, purpose, and involvement, that they may have life to the full.

Part I THE CRISIS FACING YOUTH

I

The Crisis Defined* CHARLES HABIB MALIK

I assure you it is a very great honor for me to find myself addressing you this evening. Nothing in this whole world interests me more, or moves me more deeply, or concerns me more, than some of the matters that you have asked me to talk to you about. It is therefore a real privilege for me to share with you some of my thoughts this evening. Religion, my dear friends, is the realm of the authentically personal. In religion you cannot evade things. You cannot talk about the universe, or about others, or about ideas or concepts or words; you cannot even talk about "the crisis" as though "the crisis" is out there, as though it does not affect you, as though it is not in you. In religion you cannot blame or praise conditions or things. All this blaming of conditions is so utterly unworthy of the authentic knowledge of God. Nor can you in religion talk even about religion itself, as though it is something out there that you are investigating. In religion you cannot change the subject, which is God, and this means immediately your personal relations to Hirn. Now "the universe," "conditions," ideas, con­ cepts and words, the crisis, others, and religion itself-all these things, my dear friends, are quite honorable, and it is perfectly respectable to investigate them, study them, and talk about them; * This was the opening address of the conference.

5

ED.

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Youth in Crisis

but they are not religion. Religion is the realm of the authen­ tically personal. I am a Christian. I believe in God, the Creator from nothing of heaven and earth and of everything visible and invisible. This Creator-God is the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, who is also identically the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. There was a man, born in Bethlehem of Judaea, born of a virgin whose name was Mary, a virgin who did not know man. This man's name was Jesus. He lived for about thirty years in a little town in Galilee called Nazareth, with His mother and a man called Joseph who was espoused to His mother and who remained faithful to both of them although Mary remained ever virgin. He was a car­ penter. Then, about the age of thirty, this Jesus of Nazareth began to gather around Him disciples. He taught them many things, the way you teach your students. He taught them about themselves, about God, and above all about Himself. He also moved about with His disciples in those idyllic Galilean villages only about a hundred miles south of where I was born-villages not much different then from the villages which I know perfectly in my own region. He moved about teaching, preaching, provok­ ing, challenging, healing the sick and doing many miracles. By miracles, my dear friends, I mean such things as causing a man who was born blind to see exactly as you and I do, and raising the dead-yes, the dead! He said wonderful things-things pure, powerful, deeply moving, and immediately convincing. And the strange thing about many of the things He said is that they con­ vince you only because He said them. But the totality of what He said is such that there is nothing, nothing like it in any litera­ ture. There may be approximations to it, distant rumblings of it, as in some places of the Old Testament, or in some of the teach­ ings of Zoroaster or the Buddha, or in some of the sayings of the Muslim Sufis who came a thousand years after Him, or even in some things that Socrates and Plato and the Stoics said; but when you come to what He said, you find here's the thing, here's the original, here's what everybody else before Him and after Him

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was straining after and did not quite attain, so that all these others were imitations of Him, intimations of Him, reflections, more or less impure, of Him, fallings away from Him, yearnings for Him. So what He said was uniquely wonderful. But what He did was also uniquely wonderful. He chose simple fishermen, very simple, as His disciples and He loved them to the end. He performed the miracles to which I referred. But above all, He willingly and knowingly accepted to die on the cross outside the wall of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. And nobody crucified Him, nobody crucified Him there except my fears and compromises and calculations and bigotries and sins-fears and compromises and sins which existed identi­ cally and in abundance in the hearts of those who cried, "Crucify Him, crucify Him," so that I am in no wise better than they, so that if I chanced then to be among them I would almost certainly have joined their chorus. It was inveterate human sin, then, which abounds in my heart, including my lust and my forget­ fulness of God, that killed Jesus of Nazareth on the cross outside the wall of Jerusalem under Pontius Pilate. And if my heart is slightly better, and to the extent that it is better, it is because He washed away my sin on His cross through His blood, and because He rose from the dead on the third day. Lo, I meant to kill Him but I did not succeed; lo, He triumphed over my evil design; Io, He liveth now and sitteth gloriously at the right hand of God. I am cleansed from my sin, then, because He did not die al­ though I meant Him to; or rather, because He actually and com­ pletely died exactly as I meant Him to, but through the power of God, He actually and completely rose from the dead on the third day; and because before this absolutely humiliating defeat of my intention-although for three days I thought I had tri­ umphed-I am shattered, I bow my head in shame, I beg His forgiveness, and-and this is what overpowers me-He forgives me. I say to Him after His resurrection, "Thou hast triumphed; I will not do it again; I will not hate Thee again; I will not scheme against Thee again; I will not love my pleasures and my

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self-will over Thy will; I know better." Do I really know better? Ah, that is the question! And if I do not know better, if I deny Him again, He is faithful, He cannot deny Himself. He keeps on forgiving me despite my sins, because that is His nature, and because He needs me no more now after His triumph-and that is why, with Peter, I weep bitterly, and that is why I love Him all the more. I beg you, my friends, not to be offended by the language I am using, although this language is quite honorable and has been in use for centuries. In fact I am sure you are above making fun of me when I speak of Jesus Christ as sitting now at the right hand of God the Father. I am not speaking of this three-dimensional space where you speak of right and left, and above and below, and in front and behind. Ah, "sitting at the right hand of God" is a wonderful phrase which has meaning only in the order of love and suffering and death. He who has loved much, and has suffered much, and daily faces his death, and has known Jesus Christ, understands perfectly what is meant by Jesus Christ rising from the dead on the third day and sitting now at the right hand of God the Father. Whatever is the "ontological place" of God the Creator, Jesus Christ is exactly there; Jesus Christ has ex­ actly the same mode of being as God the Creator. That is why we also use the phrase "God the Father." Never was this wonder­ ful phrase, "sitteth at the right hand of God," meant except in this ontological sense which arises wholly in the order of suffer­ ing, love, and death. I know this is how you take it, and this is how you will take everything else I shall say which might other­ wise appear scandalous. In the perfect transparency of the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of Truth, everything is perfectly clear, and when we are together attuned to Him, there can be no possibility of misunderstanding. His words were wonderful, His acts, including His resurrec­ tion, were wonderful, but He Himself is far more wonderful. He makes astounding claims about Himself, claims which no Ger-

The Crisis Defined

9

man higher cnt1c1sm can possibly completely void or explain away, claims which I believe to be all true. You have heard that it was said by them of old time . . . but I say unto you. The Son of man hath power on earth to forgive sins. My Father which is in heaven. He that loseth his life for my sake shall find it. In this place is one greater than the temple. For verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them. Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away. When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory. Take, eat; this is my body. I adjure thee by the living God, that thou tell us whether thou be the Christ, the Son of God. Jesus saith unto him, Thou hast said. All power is given unto me in heaven and in earth. All things are delivered to me of my Father: and no man knoweth who the Son is, but the Father; and who the Father is, but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him. Had ye believed Moses, ye would have believed me: for he wrote of me. Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. I am the bread of life. I am the light of the world. I am the door. I am the good shepherd. I am the true vine. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me hath everlasting life. The words that I speak unto you, they are spirit, and they are life. I am from above . . . I am not of this world.

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I proceed forth and came from God. I and my Father are one. Ye believe in God, believe also in me. All things that the Father hath are mine.

And when the woman of Samaria would again and again change the subject, He would again and again bring her back to it, until He finally tells her bluntly that it was He, who was speaking unto her, who was the Christ who should come into the world. And when Martha would change the subject by wandering off into some general cosmological expectation of the resurrection, He would bring her back to it, by telling her, "I am the resurrec­ tion, and the life." And when Thomas would change the subject by declaring that he did not know the way, He would bring him back to it, by telling him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life." And when Philip would change the subject by asking Him to show them the Father, He would bring him back to it, by telling him, "Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." I would like to know what German higher criticism would make of these things. In fact, I think I know, but I also know that, far from this criticism succeeding in judging these things, they in truth judge it. His words were wonderful, His acts were wonderful, but these claims which He made about Himself are infinitely more won­ derful. And what is even more wonderful than these claims is that there have been innumerable people throughout history­ normal people, sane people, useful people, responsible people, in the full possession of their mind-who actually believed them. Wonder of wonders-countless decent people, some of them great scientists and great philosophers, have actually believed these un­ believable claims! And these people who understood Him and believed Him and came to love Him know that He said what He

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said, and did what He did, only because He was who He said He was! And theology, my dear friends, is exactly that discipline which tries, in all humility and in all seriousness, and without any spirit of cleverness, to make sense of all these astounding claims, to make sense of them, not by explaining them away, nor by reducing them to nonsense-as so many so-called theologies do-but first by believing them, and then by trying, as best one can, to relate them among themselves and to the other proposi­ tions of Holy Writ, as well as to the deliveries of sound reason and healthy human experience. Genuine theology cannot sub­ ordinate God and how He chose to reveal Himself to what it calls reason and human experience, because, if God exists, it is He who first created both reason and human experience. Gen­ uine theology must take equally seriously all three-God, reason and experience; keeping however always in mind that, if God exists, He must in the nature of the case always come first. And it is a very strange discipline indeed which entertains even the slightest doubt about the existence of its object. I began by saying, religion is the realm of the authentically personal, and I have been telling you what I believe. For there is nothing more authentic and more personal than what we ulti­ mately believe. You may not be a Christian, but you are a man and therefore you certainly believe something, and your rock­ bottom beliefs, even if you did not know them, or even if you knew them but could not express them or were shy or ashamed of expressing them, constitute precisely your religion. Nay, you are identically your ultimate beliefs. All these silly conversations and affected smiles which we daily and hourly carry on with one another, no doubt very innocently and well meaningly, are so many ways of "changing the subject" from our fundamental be­ liefs, either because we are not sure of our beliefs, or because we are ashamed of them, suspecting in our heart that they may be hollow, or because we are never quite thrown together into that peace and grace of the Spirit which alone enables us to be per­ sonal and authentic without being and appearing at the same

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time sentimental and silly. Common worship is precisely the means of inducing this peace, this grace of the Holy Spirit, whereby we can be authentically transparent with each other. This is the wonderful significance of the great liturgies, such as that of St. John Chrysostom with which I am best acquainted. It is only when "they were all with one accord in one place" that the disciples were all filled with the Holy Ghost and began to speak with other tongues. And I am sure you agree with me that we in our hearts crave nothing more than such an experience of absolute power and illumination and certainty from above whereby we will perfectly understand each other even if we spoke "with other tongues," or even if we did not speak at all. The "other tongue" with which I am speaking to you tonight is the tongue of simple, personal conviction, which is faith in Jesus Christ. Believe me, all else is trash and dung by comparison, as Paul would say. And so, moving on now a bit faster, I further believe, hoping and trusting I will shock none of you, and if I shock you, you will forgive me; I further believe that "all things were made by him; and without him was not any thing made that was made"a tremendous statement, certainly to be most carefully explained. I believe that this same Jesus of Nazareth who now sitteth at the right hand of God is going to come again-to come again! When?, I haven't the slightest idea. How?, I do not know. But, most assuredly, He is going to come again, to judge all mankind, the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, Lord and giver of life, whom Christ sent to our hearts, so that we will not be without Him, and who inspires the faithful, and comforts them, and revives them, and reminds them of Christ, and God, and all Truth, and empowers them to do wonders, a mighty token of God in our midst. I believe in one Church, holy, catholic or universal or all-embracing, and, most especially, apostolic. Final­ ly, I believe in the resurrection of the body and in the life ever­ lasting. I beg you, once again, not to misunderstand me. I do not believe these things in the order of physical science or cosmology.

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That is to say, not because physical science and cosmological speculation can prove them to me. I studied under the greatest cosmologist of this century, Alfred North Whitehead; it is not in his sense that I believe these things. I cannot demonstrate them to you mathematically, or scientifically, or through sense perception, or as I might argue from the truth of some political or historical proposition. Oh, I most emphatically and assuredly believe in the actual, historical, physical, certain death and resur­ rection of Jesus Christ. This wonderful deposit of faith, which I have received, and of which I must prove worthy, and to which I must remain faithful, belongs to the order of suffering, anxiety, love, and death. He who suffers understands what I mean. He who daily wrestles with the devil understands what I mean. He who is anxious understands what I mean. He who loves intensely understands what I mean. And he who faces his death and all that this death actually and concretely means in his own life understands what I mean. Faith, my dear friends, is grounded in the order of suffering and love, an order more original than any other order, an order from which every other order, including science, philosophy, history, and politics, flows and emanates. What now, I ask, are the reasons for my faith? After asking us to "sanctify the Lord God in our hearts"-people often forget this preamble-St. Peter adds: "Be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear." Obviously I cannot go into my reasons in great detail, but the kind of reasons I would argue from are the following: First, I have been taught these things from my earliest life by people, both religious and lay, who loved me most purely and who had absolutely no ax to grind save to witness to the deepest they know. Therefore I trust them. Second, the authority of the Church in its teachings, its tradi­ tions, its doctrines, its liturgy, for two thousand years. Here again I believe the motive is absolutely pure; therefore I believe the Church. Third, the authority of the Bible, which I love most dearly,

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and which, the more I read it, the more it means everything to me. Fourth, the witness of the saints, and I can name twenty of them, in whose intellectual and spiritual company I crave to live more than in the company of any other crowd of men, in­ cluding the greatest nonreligious philosophers, whom I also love. Fifth, the testimony of what I have called the order of suffer­ ing, loneliness, love, and death, in its daily, hourly, minutely, cumulative impact upon the whole of my life. Sixth, in a sense, this is the most important reason: the Holy Spirit in my heart when it is there and to the extent that it is there. To the question, What is the reason of the hope that is in me? I answer-I trust in meekness and fear, and after sanctifying the Lord God in my heart-these are my reasons, than which I can­ not imagine anything more solid or more dependable. Why, my dear friends, did I plague you so far with my per­ sonal faith? Why did I bore you with this queer recital of the Nicene Creed which all of you know by heart? Because pre­ sumably we are dealing with religion in this conference, and religion is the realm of the authentically personal; and because you wanted me to define for you what you have termed "the crisis," and the crisis, at its deepest, has to do precisely with these priceless articles of faith which were first formulated more than sixteen centuries ago and which have been faithfully confessed by the Church ever since. God is denied, or watered down, or changed beyond recognition. Creation is denied, or at least the world is conceived as self-creative. Jesus of Nazareth has become an "adamant young man," as Dag Hammarskjold has called Him in his book that all of you must have read. His claims about Himself are either denied outright or passed by in magnificent silence. His passion is denied, the cross is denied, His resurrec­ tion is a myth, and who would dare speak today of His Second Coming, or of the Holy Ghost, or of the apostolicity of the

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Church, or, in this age of science, of the resurrection of the body, without being utterly ridiculed? Doubtless, my dear friends, you have your own ultimate con­ victions which constitute your own religion. Doubtless many of them coincide with mine, since we have gathered together within a general Christian context. Doubtless, too, you have your own reasons for the hope that is in you, both with regard to what you do and what you do not share with me. We are meeting here in perfect mutual good will, and just as you have honored me by listening to my faith and to the reasons I gave for that faith in meekness and fear, so I assure you I would be even more honored if I should listen to your faith and the reasons on which you base it. How else can community arise, how else can truth and joy fill the air, except by such honest sharing? It is only on the basis of this that I can talk to you about "the crisis." Everything else is relatively nonsense unless I first set forth before you the ground from which I proceed and on which I base my entire understanding of the world and the times in which we live. And so, having performed that-without, I trust, offending anybody-I shall now, again in meekness and fear, state in the tersest possible terms what I call the dimensions of the crisis, namely, the diverse matters, appertaining to diverse levels of existence, which constitute the crisis, which cause peo­ ple to be on edge, to be utterly bewildered, to be uncertain of themselves and of the future. I say I shall exhibit this material in the tersest possible terms because I hope we shall have occa­ sion later this evening and throughout this conference to discuss, at least some of it, in greater detail. 1 . The fear of atomic and nuclear weapons haunts every thinking man all the time. This in itself is enough to throw peo­ ple in a state of crisis. 2. There are a dozen sources of international conflict, at pres­ ent relatively dormant and quiescent, but capable of Haring up any minute: India-Pakistan, Arab-Israeli, Cyprus, Berlin, the Congo, the whole African continent seething, Indonesia, China

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Youth in Crisis

and her relation to all her neighbors, the problem of European unity, the Yemen war has not yet disclosed all its aftermath, the essential instability plaguing nearly all the newly independent nations. 3. The United States has peculiar social problems of her own, which are likely to become more and more critical as times goes on. 4. Real, stable peace in Europe and therefore in the world is impossible while Germany remains divided. 5. The greatest problem facing the world now and for genera­ tions to come is China, and this problem is at the base of every crisis affiicting the world. Now 700,000,000 people; in fifteen years I ,000,000,000 human beings; in fifty years-fifty years when some of you will only be grandmothers-2,000,000,000 human beings. This mere thought staggers the imagination and throws every other calculation-every other calculation-into utter irrelevance and confusion. 6. All these international crises reflect themselves in the rela­ tive impotence of the United Nations. 7. The great scientific revolution has mechanized and atomized life, with the result that man's humanity has considerably suffered. 8. The anonymity of urban existence has wrought havoc on man's spirit and man's character, for under this anonymity you can get away with much more than you could in smaller and more intimate communities. 9. The population explosion all over the world is darkening humanity's horizons-a decade, a generation, a century from now. 1 o. Affiuence, untempered by moral effort and by the call of the remote, has a distinctly bad effect upon man. It makes him soft and flabby and causes him to live under a false sense of security. Thus a steadily rising standard of living, which is one of the axioms of this age, should be fundamentally questioned. It is by no means an unmixed blessing. 1 1 . The mind is daily bombarded with innumerable things.

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It cannot take them, much less understand them. This sheer multiplicity of stimuli distracts, confuses, pulverizes. The pristine simplicity and unity of life tends to be lost. 1 2. We meet today strange and other peoples and things more than ever before. This perpetual meeting of the strange and other has an upsetting effect upon the human mind, for the strange always seduces and dislocates. 1 3. We witness a universal moral crash today, also mentioned in your Call. I refer to it as a moral crash: values, standards, principles, have become ambiguous; people are not living by them; there is no fear of the invisible Judge; there is no fear of the Lord. 14. We witness the universal phenomenon of the rise of the lower, the more dark (of course not in the sense of skin, but in the sense of mind and spirit and outlook and total moral worth), the less formed, both individually, socially and internationally, against the higher, the more enlightened, and the more formed, and these appear to be helpless before this onslaught from below. 1 5. The clamor of the less developed on the more developed is increasing, so that the more developed begin to interpret them­ selves in terms of the less developed, than which nothing can be more tragic. 1 6. Economic and material values predominate. 1 7. Secularism, or the self-sufficiency of the world, both hu­ man and natural, is the keynote of all human endeavor today. Man has banished God, the free, and independent, and trans­ cendent, and sovereign God, from any relevance to history and decision. 18. Thus atheism flourishes, both in its half-conscious form­ and we all know that it exists in the finest societies in this form­ and its consciously militant form. 19. When the Christian finds himself one among many, he tends to be relativistic, unless he starts with firm knowledge of what he believes. Relativism-the absence of fixed, given norms (the emphasis is on "given"; we did not create these norms; they

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Youth in Crisis

were given to us; how they were given, from where they came, who or what gave them, all this of course is a great problem), the absence of order and rank, uncertainty as to the truth of one's own roots-this, too, is a great crisis in the soul of man today. 20. Reason, which used to be sung as the greatest thing in man, reason as an independent power, is denied, or at least it is subordinated to instinct, to dark impulse, to accident, to the capricious will of the mob, to the requirements of society, to the good of the party, to the interests of the nation. 2 1 . Exactly at the moment when so much depends on America, when so much is expected from America, exactly at this moment the creative thought of America, namely, its philoso­ phers, are not supplying the needed leadership. A great tragedy is being enacted in the departments of philosophy of the Anglo­ Saxon world, when the mind of Asia, Africa, and Latin America is absolutely avid for fundamental intellectual sustenance. No wonder this mind turns away toward sensualism, Communism, materialism, existentialism, and everything dark and illiberal. 22. A series of historical accidents have caused the more intel­ lectual-spiritual departments of learning to be seized by cynics, atheists, and materialists, who dub together and tend to perpetu­ ate their ilk, but who cannot possibly represent the best in Western civilization. 23. We witness the phenomenon of the rise of quantity against quality. This is one way of expressing, with proper quali­ fications, the problem of China, which, as I said before, is behind every other problem. It is also one way of expressing the crisis of freedom and of the individual human person. 24- When you speak of the necessity of a great purpose for human life, people make fun of you. But, my dear friends, to live only for work and security and pleasure and the family, noble as these things are, is not enough. Without a transcendent meaning, life is meaningless. 25. Perhaps America has taken on too much; perhaps she had no choice but to take on too much. But, alas, this distracts and

The Crisis De-fined

19

saps the unity and force of the total impact. How to re-collect one's resources into a new and higher unity-this is the question. One can cite other dimensions, other phenomena, of the crisis. But these twenty-five points are enough to show that we are dealing with a sort of total judgment. And the effect of this multidimensional crisis is the under­ mining and weakening of the priceless jewel of faith which we have received from our ancestors. My dear friends, you can divide the world into classes, into nations, into races, into cultures, into languages; but you can also divide it into those who have retained their faith despite all the undermining and overwhelming to which it has been subjected, and those who have lost it. If God exists, then this of course is the deepest divi­ sion. There is here a mysterious selection,. and those who raised at least the question of pre-election, from Paul to Calvin and Karl Barth, were not talking nonsense. There is here at least a profound problem to ponder. When the Son of man comes again, will He find faith upon this earth? If He comes now, yes, He will find faith; He will find some waiting for Him. What made them remain faithful in the face of all this multidimensional crisis, is the question. Perhaps He had something to do with it Himself. It will be the burden of my last statement* on Saturday to show that despite the crisis, and in a sense because of the crisis, we have much to thank God for, much to rejoice in, much to pin our hope and faith on, provided we take to heart the words of Jeremiah : "Thus saith the Lord, Let not the wise man glory in his wisdom, neither let the mighty man glory in his might, let not the rich man glory in his riches : but let him that glorieth glory in this, that he understandeth and knoweth me, that I am the Lord which exercise lovingkindness, judgment, and righteous­ ness, in the earth : for in these things I delight, saith the Lord" (9 : 23-24). And provided we listen to the words of our Lord: "And I say unto you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye

* For this statement,

see pp. 53-67. ED,

20

Youth in Crisis

shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Luke 11 :9). And provided we cry with the Psalmist, exactly as he meant us to cry : "Praise ye the Lord. Praise the Lord, 0 my soul. While I live I praise the Lord : I will sing praises unto my God while I have my being" (1 4 6: 1-2).

2 The Crisis Revealed WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR.

Before I start saying a few things about my under­ standing of God, the changing world, and the crisis of youth, or maybe it's the crisis of schools, let me say a couple of things by way of preliminary observation. I hope you will agree with me that whenever God is taken seriously, divisions ensue; we must free ourselves of the illusion that we serve Christ by repressing controversy. To suppress con­ troversy is to suppress hostility so that when Christians (and this happens very often) finally do take stands, they are unduly belligerent. I say this because I want to make a sharp difference with Mr. Malik's remarks of last night.* I'll come to it further on but let me simply make it as sharp as possible now by saying that I think he represents the kind of "back-to-God" American legion­ naire, poster kind of religion that is not going to solve the crisis one bit as far as our youth are concerned. I say that with complete admiration for Mr. Malik, whom I trailed around as a kid at the United Nations, thinking this was one of God's finest gifts to the world, and I still think so; but that doesn't mean we can't have serious disagreements. I think that these divisions that Christ brings point to a greater unity in Christ which we all have so that it is quite right that we should have lively controversy, * See pp. 5-20 for the statement referred to. ED.

21

22

Youth in Crisis

lively differences, and we simply must not let our disagreementi shade off into distrust. I'll put it this way: Karl Jaspers said, "] am through the other. But the degree of our self-awareness de­ pends upon the intensity of the encounter." The more intense our encounter or differences, the more we're going to come to some kind of shock of recognition. Therefore, I hope you will feel as I do that the more controversy we have, the better it is going to be for all of us. In his Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis tells of the wild dream told him by a monk, Father Joachim. In this dream Mary brings the twelve-year-old Jesus to be cured of what obviously must be demons. Alone with the boy, Father Joachim says to him, · porn · t· hurt, my son.';l" "Here, here," Jesus rep11es "Where does 1t ing to his heart. "And what's wrong with you?" "I can't sleep, eat, or work. I roam the streets, wrestling." "Whom are you wrestling with?" "With God. Whom else do you expect me to be wrestling with?" Father Joachim keeps the boy for a month, puts him in a carpenter shop to learn the trade, speaks to him ever so gently of God as if he were a neighbor who dropped by on an evening to sit on the doorstep and chat. At the end of the month the boy is completely cured. He no longer wrestles with God; he becomes like all other men. He departs for Galilee and Father Joachim learns afterward that he has become a fine carpenter, in fact, the best in Nazareth. Instead of saving the world, he becomes the best carpenter in Nazareth. I think we can all understand this dream. Which of us does not at some time at least long to seek salvation by doing excellent work within our limit? But, I don't think even the church can finally cure us of God. For I believe the power of God is lodged deep in the marrow of our substance and is constantly pressing for release in order to permeate every fiber of our being. This means that the demand of the power of God is not for self­ denial as is so often falsely preached, but rather for self-discovery and self-realization, which includes the commitment to God that is the final fulfillment of human life. This I think is what St.

The Crisis Revealed

23

Paul means when he says, "God searches our inmost being" and "the Kingdom of God consists not in word but in power" -and to think we can escape wrestling with this power is to dream. But Paul also writes, "the whole created universe groans in all its parts as if in the pangs of childbirth." I think this same struggle to pull all the bits and pieces together into one integrated dedicated whole, that takes place on an individual level, takes place on the world level as well. God is no Unmoved Mover. Who was ever moved by an unmoved mover? What is moving about God is not only that he made the world but that he is still making the world; trying in our day before our eyes to bring into one integrated dedicated whole all the scattered fragments of mankind. And as we are called to be co-creators with him in the shaping of our individual destinies, so with him we are called to be co-creators in the shaping in the life of the world. This is our destiny, our corporate commission, and to think we can dodge this commission is not only to dream but to turn the world into a nightmare. I would like to insist further on this if it should become neces­ sary because I was impressed by the acute observation of a good atheist at Yale the other day who said, "You know, so much Christian prayer strikes me as parallel play-children on the play­ ground, each one concerned with his own toy, nothing going on between." To the degree that this is true, to the same degree we have denied our corporate destiny and commission. I want to insist on the large scale of it because if you look at the seminars which are coming afterward, they are a typical reflection of the micro-ethics which concern the church today. They have nothing to do with what I'm talking about in shaping the destiny of the world, and that's why they don't cut the mustard with the intellectually serious and the morally acute among our students. Not that they aren't important, but they are important as effects, not as causes. Easily the most exciting person I read all summer was the great French Jesuit and paleontologist, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

24

Youth in Crisis

As many of you know, for years Teilhard occupied a very expose, outpost in the no-man's land between the conventional bounc aries of science and religion. He was forbidden permission to pul lish and his funeral in 1 9 5 5 was attended by ten mourners. Bu since then prince and priest of the church alike and countles nonbelievers have been dazzled by his vision of God's power mm, ing through the universe. According to Teilhard, for the past three hundred millioi years, life has steadily advanced, changing its skin every ten mi: lion years, give or take a million years! And in its advance it ha been sustained by a strange complicity on the part of the so-calle, "blind" forces of the universe. At every point Teilhard see formidable coincidences, marvelous conjunctions, such as thos that made possible the entry of our cave-dwelling forebears upoi the scene. Listen to this : If the creature from which man issued had not been a biped, hi hands would not have been free in time to release the jaws fror their prehensile function, and the thick band of maxillary muscle which had imprisoned the cranium could not have been relaxec It is thanks to two-footedness freeing the hands that the brain w2 able to grow; and thanks to this, too, that the eyes brought closer tc gether on the diminished face, were able to converge and fix o what the hands held and brought before them, the very gestm which formed the external counterpart of reflection.* And the birth of thought represented an infinite leap forwarc an explosion into a new phase of life comparable to water reacl ing the boiling point and dramatically releasing a tumultum expansion of freed and vaporized molecules. Almost nothin in the organs had changed, but a great revolution had take place. "Consciousness was now leaping and boiling in a space ( supersensory relationships and representations." * *

P·

* The Phenomenon of Man (New York : Harpers, 1959 1 70.

** Ibid., p. 169.

The Crisis Revealed

25

From this moment on evolution must be viewed as the progres­ sive intensification of consciousness which until now had been only latent in matter. Evolution must be viewed in psychical and not in physical terms. For once again evolution is the ascent of conscience. If scientists would be willing to try that one, what a different view of the world we'd have. Now what has happened since then? Since then the world has gone through what Teilhard called an enormous recuillement, a great gathering-in of all life. The world is no longer a divergent but a convergent world, a world of extraordinary unification and concentration. He talks of economic concentration as seen in the unification of all the earth's energies. He talks of intellectual concentration as manifest in the unification of human thought into one coherent science; and he talks of social concentration in the increasing unification of the human mass into a thinking whole. In short, a unified mankind is the great evolutionary fact of our time. Do you hear what he is saying? He is saying it's the Utopians and not the "realists" who are the scientists. But there's a hitch. "We are one," as Teilhard says, "corps a corps, et tete a ti�te, mais non pas, coeur a coeur." Body to body, mind to mind, but not yet heart to heart. For we have made two fatal mistakes. On the one hand, we have confused human unity with human collectivization, which is not the celebration but the degradation of consciousness. An impersonal system of unity is in and of itself depersonalized. On the other hand, in our concern for the indi­ vidual we have confused individuality with personality. The acme of our originality is not our individuality but our person, and to fulfill our person we cannot separate ourselves from others. That actually diminishes us and pulls the world backward again into plurality and matter. To be ourselves we must move not away but toward one another, for "the true ego grows in inverse proportion to 'egoism.' " So the challenge of our time becomes clear. We must release this power of God which is locked in the marrow of our sub-

26

Youth in Crisis

stance, for this power is essentially what the Bible calls love and what Teilhard with incredible freedom calls psychical energy. How's that for a new synthesis of science and religion? We must release this love-for, Teilhard says, love alone is capable "of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves." In short, our challenge is to accept a unified mankind as the great evolutionary fact of our time and to personalize the universe, to make it the only kind of universe that is for persons. That type of vision will wash with the intellectually seriom and with the morally acute among our students. I think it alsc makes a great deal of sense to most of us here. But I'm afraid that our problem is that the students are ahead of us. Let me put it this way : Teddy Roosevelt said of William Howard Taft, "He means well, feebly." I am going to try to be as honest as possible. My impressions of prep schools are not as profound as yours. But I am a graduate of prep schools, and I'm on that prep-school circuit almost every other Sunday. Of course, I do get the results, at least those tha1 come to Yale, and also I do talk to a good many in other places Therefore, I think I can speak with a certain amount of authority If we say that progress toward God lies only in unity, then this say! something of course about those organizations which encourag( this type of synthesis. How much time do we give in our school: to the United Nations? Mr. Malik served the United Nation with real distinction, and I think it is absolutely scandalous tha he gets so little backing and the United Nations gets so littl1 backing from schools and colleges. I chose the United Nation because I knew that Mr. Malik would be here, and because 01 Sunday we celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the Unite1 Nations. I can hear the speeches now, what great sensation2 agricultural successes were achieved in Peru and Tanzania by th United Nations. But, how many people are going to have the re< integrity and courage to say the United Nations is in shambles

The Crisis Revealed

27

And why? Because, I think, as a Latin diplomat in the United Nations put it recently: "Around here things always tend to disappear. If it's a conflict between two small nations and we deal with it, then the conflict disappears. If it's a conflict between a small nation and a large nation then alas, the small nation disappears. If it's a conflict between two large nations, then it is dramatic because it is the U.N. that disappears." The United Nations disappears for one basic reason : not one of the ruling sovereign powers in this world has surrendered to it one iota of its absolute national sovereignty. Any morally acute, intellectually serious student knows that the time is far gone to start mounting a carefully planned assault on the now dangerously outmoded concept of national sover­ eignty. But does he get any support on that in colleges and schools? What courses wrestle with this kind of problem? What courses deal with the future unity of mankind, if there is going to be any kind of mankind? I'm not minimizing the problem. I know that the vested interest in the academic world makes the vested interest in the business world look pale by comparison. But if the problems are complex, they simply demand that much more attention; and if education is going to be relevant to the intellectually serious and morally acute, then we've got to start dealing with this kind of problem. Neither in the curriculum, in extracurricular activities, discussion groups, seminars, nor in terms of who is invited, with school money, to talk do I see any evidence that the United Nations is getting anything like a fair shake. If you've given up on the United Nations, that's one thing; but if you haven't given up on the United Nations and if you buy this vision, then you do mean well. If we've said that progress toward unity in this changing world lies only in further unity, this says, does it not, that we must separate the profound forces that make for unity from the more superficial forces that make for continued diversion. We have to insist that we have more in common than we have in conflict. But it is impossible on the American scene today to insist upon

28

Youth in Crisis

that in regard to Red China. We can't look at the Chinese, w Christians can't look at the Chinese without seeing "red," in bot: senses of the word. Except the Quakers in their new Chin policy, we cannot see them. We can't see the Chinese people fin and foremost as a community of fellow human beings, fello, inheritors of the travails and splendor of the world, people lik ourselves caught in the web of space and time who then, an only then, are Communists as we are Democrats, Republicans, c what have you. In other words, we have allowed ideologic< differences to become an idolatry. We have absolutized a relativt Now let's return to the concrete situation. Where, for instanct on the campus are there courses in Far Eastern study? The futur belongs to the poor and the colored, and we still spend all ou time studying the rich and the white. We must have courses c study on China, we must have some understanding of Marxisrr which is not a dying ideology, but a fast-changing ideology. think, myself, if Christians would chuck some of their excei baggage and get with the world, we might find Marxists chuckin their excess baggage in the form of their messianic atheism, whic is really not inherent to the viability of their views as far as Man ism goes as an economic policy. But there is no study of Marxis1 except in a most patronizing sort of way, and there is preci0t little study of Far Eastern matters in most of our prep school This is why to the intellectually serious and morally acute i much of our study is not real. Also, it seems to me that we are getting into a very difficul touchy situation as regards the student attitudes which have beE generally accepted as okay views about America-the land of tl free, the cradle of liberty, a country that believes in a ballot b< and the courts as proper redress for grievances, etc., etc. In } latest book, Alfred Kazin writes of the '3o's : "It was obvious me that everywhere even in Hitler Germany to be Jewish and be outside society was to be nearer to the heart of things." I thi1 it is becoming increasingly apparent that the further you are frc the seat of power the nearer you are to the heart of things. I

The Crisis Revealed

29

not that the weak are inherently more virtuous. As power corrupts the strong, so lack of power corrupts the weak. Intolerance, sus­ picion, arrogance, apathy-all these fruits of weakness are charac­ teristic of life in the slums. What I am saying is that truth is a liability. The church must never forget it. Truth is a liability and therefore those who stand most to lose find truth least accessible, too. There is a wonderful statement by Rabbi Nachmann, of Brasislav: "Victory cannot tolerate truth and that which is spread before your eyes you will reject because you are a victor." In the minds of students it is becoming increasingly true that the victor cannot see the truth. Think, for instance, how that word "responsible" is used, abused, and misused. I remember how the rich and the powerful in this country, having done practically nothing to initiate anything in the field of civil rights, kept reiterating, "We want responsible Negro leadership," completely begging the question, responsible to what? White interest? Negro needs? I am more and more impressed by how the rich and the powerful in this country are the ones who talk about America as the defender of freedom. But let's be ruthlessly honest: is it really freedom we are defending or, first and fore­ most, the privileges which freedom has brought to us and emi­ nently to us? Albert Camus used to tell us that "freedom consists not principally of privileges but especially of duties." And if free­ dom's duties held sway over freedom's privileges in America, then why weren't these same people shouting bloody murder over Batista before Castro, over Trujillo, over the overthrow of Juan Bosch? It is this type of hypocrisy which is solidifying itself. This last week we heard how the government overreacted to the burn­ ing of a draft card in a way that was designed to solidify the view of draft-card burners who were just asking for this. The govern­ ment was assinine on this. The government is really patho­ logically anti-Communist-psychopathologically anti-Communist. Think, for instance, of the hypocrisy that these students face when they pull-off a demonstration. Think what happened when they pulled off a demonstration in front of the Chase Manhattan

30

Youth in Crisis

Bank last year. Alan Paton says over and over again that the banks and other American businesses which are investing fr South African economy are prolonging apartheid down there But the representative of the Chase Manhattan Bank said that S< long as our government maintains friendly relations with Soutl Africa, the bank believed that it would not be warranted in aw attempt to interfere with the flow of international commerce b� exercising special discrfrnination. What do these poor student feel like, if not a sensitive piece of grain looking at a millstone' Listen to what this fellow said, who headed up the demonstra tion : "The most aggravating thing about the discussion was tha Mr. Marshall took a condescending attitude toward us. He wa essentially friendly but he was unwilling to admit the possibilit; that what we were saying was real." Then what do we do to these students? It was the day of pro test on Vietnam and I happened to be down in old L.B.J. country at the University of Texas. First of all, the mayor of Austir denied permission to parade. Oh, if you belong to Zeta Zeta Zet. or something, or have a football rally and say, "Hook 'em loni horn, hook 'em long horn," until you disturb everyone's peace that's fine. But you're just not allowed by the mayor to have demonstration of protest. On the campus I had to mediate fo the umpteenth time between two forces which more and mor are lined up against each other. On the one hand was the S.D.S Students for a Democratic Society, wearing the uniform c protest-the beards, the sandals, the girls in bluejeans rather tha skirts. These people are at least sensitive enough to be bruise by contemporary history. They feel that America has lost i capacity to suffer, whether it's in southeast United States < Southeast Asia. And I think to a large degree they're right. ThE are also personally hung up in many ways. They desperate need recognition and they need to be treated with a considerab amount of understanding. Now what kind of treatment were the getting? A raid against them by the future L.B.J.'s of Americ people who, like the President, have an urge for power that is

The Crisis Revealed

31

primordial as a salmon going upstream to spawn. One of them­ but I certainly don't say this of the President-one of them was so slippery that I really felt compelled to tell him that compared to him an eel looked like a leech. They're just born politicos out there. But what is it that these students were telling the S.D.S. boys? "You can't communicate, man, you can't communicate un­ til you get off that silly beard and put on some socks and until you girls put a skirt on like any decent girl would wear." Typical stuff. Asking the S.D.S. to undertake a public relations maneuver when public relations is precisely what diseases the dealings of man with man in this country according to the S.D.S.-and they are right! Now we do exactly the same thing don't we? We're about to strangle ourselves on our necktie complex at Yale, and most of you are, too. I don't mind being thoughtful about it, but it's a very risky business communicating it. For instance, what if Yale were to say, "We think that all students should be involved in tutorials, we think that every student is almost morally obligated to spend some of his time in the countries of the poor and the colored because they make up the future. We think that every student is morally obligated to look at his vocational decision because the acquisition of knowledge is second to its use, and oh, incidentally, we think everybody ought to wear a necktie." That would be something better. But they don't say anything about these other things, they just fasten on the necktie and therefore we are not communicating with these people. What do we do about trying to reach those who are being pushed more and more one way or the other? They are either being pushed off to the far left into an increasingly disenchanted position or, because they are failing to find other channels for expression, they are going to join the indifferent. This to me is a desperate moment because there is much malaise and discontent in our students. If they don't get a chance to express it properly in moral indignation then they are going to repress it, and you know what happens when repression takes place. We'll have spiritual apathy in this country

32

Youth in Crisis

the likes of which we have never seen before. And we're headed that way if the government insists that burning one's draft card is more important than the preservation of dissention. What are we going to do with these students? For one thing, I think they need more models in terms of teachers. Let's look at ourselves out here. Thank goodness we have a couple of nuns; I don't know whether they're Roman Catholic or Episcopal. The rest of us are, of course, Protestant, and naturally we're also white. I have seen only one Negro face. We're almost all Anglo­ Saxon Protestant, which of course is understandable in a meeting like this, but that's also the way it is back home on the campus. We are almost nothing but well-rnunded faculty members-and a bunch of well-rounded faculty members does not make a well­ rounded faculty. Again, I know all the problems-you've got to have them coaching and you've got to have them the kind of people who can hold students' hands in some way or another. But that is why you don't get interesting teachers. I'll be frank with you. I'm not impressed with people who are going into prep­ school teaching anymore. I'm not impressed. I think they're look­ ing for an easy way out. You don't get much pay, but the situation is nice enough-you're far away from any real problems, particu­ larly in the small Christian schools out there in the middle of no place so concerned with preserving students from urban vices that we don't give them a chance to develop some virtue by being involved with urban problems. That is why small Christian schools turn out small Christians. By contrast, Richard H. Mcfeely still manages to keep alive some of these issues because of the real Quaker tradition that goes through the George School, of which he is headmaster. It seems to me that students have to have some kind of "way out" guys, some fighting socialist, somebody who feels the same kind of moral indignation about the world that they feel. And there is only one way to fit them into the faculty. You will have to look for them, or ask people like me to go out and try to find them for you if you're serious about really giving them a fair shake on

The Crisis Revealed

33

the campus. This is going to mean trouble. Maybe the alumni will drop out of the trees and come running. But the students are going to be in a terrible bind unless they find some human being with whom they feel they can be really open, with whom they feel they can really relate. In summary, do we or do we not take seriously the changing world that we have? And I say do we or do we not take it seriously because we may give it lip service; but words are not always consequential. One of the great problems of church and school is that our words are cathartic. They don't lead toward ac­ tion. They take the place of action because we enunciate so well. Do we or do we not take seriously the vision of a unified mankind as the evolutionary fact of our time? If we do, and if knowledge of the past is supposed to prepare our students for the future, without loss of academic standing or intellectual content, shouldn't we seriously revise our curriculum so that the Far East, Latin America, Africa, and all areas which are traditionally ignored in an incredible way get far more attention? Shouldn't we take institutions like the United Nations in a more important way? Again, I don't particularly care at this point how we do it­ curricular or extracurricular. But where the school's budget goes, that's how I check out a school. I ask how much money you have for lectureships and where does it go? If much greater emphasis were given to this type of thing, maybe we would be helping students in a changing world. Do we take people who take the future seriously, or do we take those who are really saying, "For weal or woe, my status is quo." The average prep school, I'm afraid, is not as interesting as a public school. I'll tell you frankly, I prefer now going to a public high school. There is always a handful of guys there who, I think, are not only intellectually serious but morally acute, and they're much more risk-prone than the people in the prep school. So friends, what will it be? Shall we become the best car­ penters in Nazareth-or shall we save the world?

3 The Crisis Accepted WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW

The Call of this conference declares that "much that we have counted on in the past seems to be inadequate. . . . Our faith in the Church and in religious curricula, our depend­ ence on parental standards and school ideals, and our reliance on conventions of society and the dictates of the human heart have not been able to combat the instability, moral confusion, and aimlessness so widespread among young people." My response to that assertion is that, if true, it proves the instability, moral confusion, and aimlessness of faith in the Church and in religious curricula, dependence on parental standards and school ideals, and reliance upon conventions of society and the dictates of the human heart. The crisis which young people in private and-let them not be overlooked-in public education face today is not specifically their own moral decadence or absence of purpose or bewilder­ ment. The crisis of youth and, for that matter, the crisis of their elders, today concerns the unreliability, corruption, and obsoles­ cence of many of the inherited institutions, policies, laws, stand­ ards, and presuppositions of this society. The sins of the fathers may be visited upon the sons, but that does not thereby absolve the fathers. As a Christian I remember that men are always in crisis. Crisis is the very theme portrayed in the third chapter of the Book of 35

36

Youth in Crisis

Genesis. It is crisis to be sent forth from a womb. Crisis is not some peculiar affiiction of midtwentieth-century America or of its adolescent population-least of all of its tiny minority of prep­ school students. So let none be astonished or unduly distressed by crisis nowadays. Of course there is crisis : crisis is the norma­ tive human situation, empirically, historically, and biblically. Crisis, far from being some novel, occasional or recent occurrence is, in truth, a synonym for the Fall. In other words, though there be terrible and marvelous and fearsome and profound crises today, they cannot be attributed merely to youthful aberrations or arrogance or ignorance or lust. They cannot be intelligently regarded as unique or even unusual, as less predictable or more unexpected, as more perilous or more pathetic, as more poignant or any more important, compared with any other generation of mankind. Beyond that, I remain spontaneously and steadfastly suspicious of all talk of crisis. For adults to become greatly agitated about the views and conduct and values of their own offspring too easily aborts the freedom and humanity of the young. Hopefully, youth will be helped and edified by the scandals and accomplish­ ments and failures of the past, but youth today have just as much right to go down the garden path or, indeed, to descend into the depths of hell, as any of their ancestors, parents, or teachers and it is, I suggest, a mark of maturity for an older person to respect that liberty of the young. Meanwhile, I admit to one other suspicion when adults discuss youth's crisis, namely, in adult society the religious are often gravely tempted to flagellation. I detect a notion that if young people today, whom adults have borne, reared, taught, and tried to nurture and discipline, are found in crisis then adults should gather to mourn and moan and thereby expiate their failures and omissions. It would not surprise me if that were the reason for the present conference. Flagellation is a venerable if perverse, and popular if apostate, religious practice because it has the attraction of proving one's moral significance by self�assessed

The Crisis Accep ted

37

punishment for default or misdeed in the place of either justifica­ tion by good works or justification by the grace of God. I will not nourish any such morbid sentiment for anybody.

AN INHERITANCE OF DECADENCE

If the crisis which youth in contemporary America confront is not so much a matter of their own instability or lack of purpose as it is the corruption and inadequacies of institutions and presuppositions which youth inherit, what are some of the symptoms and other symbols of this inheritance of decadence, especially those related to the enterprise in society of the inde­ pendent schools? Without professing to be exhaustive, I suggest that these are among such: 1 . The Idolatry of Property. The young are heirs to a society in which property is exalted as an idol. It is not that Americans are just inordinately fond of property or of the appurtenances of property, though they are that, but it is the imputation to the acquisition, ownership, management, or possession of property of the moral significance of a man's life which constitutes the idolatry. In earlier days a man's moral worth might be highly esteemed if he through his own initiative and labor earned and owned much property. Nowadays it does not matter how prop­ erty is acquired-by inheritance, marriage, guile, or theft-nor does it matter whether property is actually owned so long as a man controls the condiments of property. The corollary of this idolatrous regard for property is that the man without property, the poor, the dispossessed of society, are morally inferior : indolent or weak or wicked. The acquisition of property is the means of justification and, thus, to be poor is a sin. That is a view of property which, unhappily, is often propa­ gated and praised in the churches and one which the independent schools have often pampered in their admissions practices and fund-raising efforts. Empirically it is a vain notion, overlooking,

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as it does, how dependent in this world all those who are prosper­ ous and have property are upon the continued incumbency of the poor in poverty. Theologically the idolatry of property is anathema to the gospel of Jesus Christ, as all doctrines of justi­ fication by works are. 2. Moral Duplicity in Investments. The idolatrous regard for property is related to the effective social witness which the inde­ pendent schools, among other institutions, particularly the churches and the universities and colleges, make in America. There are few independent schools remaining which openly espouse racism either in their admissions policies or in teaching philosophy or in their broader involvement in the community. But how many independent schools exist and flourish because of revenue earned from endowment investments in enterprises in commerce and industry which practice racism in hiring, merchandising, advertising, promotions, personnel training, and the like? Every investment of every single dollar is a social wit­ ness supporting the policies of the enterprises in which the investment is made. And, I suggest, the witness of investment is louder than pious pronouncements uttered in compulsory chapel or benevolent recitals in school catalogues. How many faculty members, alumni, parents of students, administrators, or trustees of schools have ever even examined their investment portfolios to ascertain whether they are economically supporting racism? If adults related to independent schools want seriously to discuss the crisis facing youth, then do not talk about the aimlessness or confusion of some kid who masturbates in the gymnasium or the instability and recalcitrance of a boy who doesn't want to fight in Vietnam, but consider, instead, the legacy of moral duplicity evidenced in schools professing a Christian tradition which, like virtually all of the churches that are their patrons, underwrite racism through the investment of their endowments. 3. An Ethos of White Supremacy. This society, to which youth are the heirs, is one in which for nearly four centuries there has been built into the fabric of education, in both private and

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public schools, the principle of white supremacy. It was of course, in the era of chattel slavery and in the period of legal segrega­ tion, often a vulgar and blatant white supremacy; now it is much more subtle and understated. The assumption is deeply inbred in the mentality of white people, especially those of the middle and upper classes, right now in the midst of the racial crisis, that what Negro citizens receive in this society is not a matter of birthright but of the gratuitous dispensation of the white estab­ lishment. Some will complain, I realize, that many independent schools are integrated. There are foreign students on the cam­ puses, for example. That is fine, but that does not represent integration exactly because they are not Americans, not to men­ tion that very many of them come from most aristocratic families in other countries. How many students are there in the inde­ pendent schools who were born in the urban ghettos? The barest handful. At best there is in some schools, just as in the colleges, token integration. But that is not enough. What is needed is sig­ nifrcant integration where there will be, on a campus, so many American Negro students that every sector of campus life is inte­ grated and every person in the school community-both black and white-is required by those very circumstances to discern and confront the issues of what it means to live together as one society. That opportunity is not afforded by mere tokenism. Others will complain that few Negroes can be found who are qualified for admission to the independent schools. I suggest that that raises first of all the issue of whether existing admissions procedures are realistic and responsible and, indeed, whether they are silently discriminatory. I venture that built-in to admis­ sions testing and interviewing is the assumption that the appli­ cant will be white, and will come from a certain home and church and social background, in very much the same way, for example, that it is, in the law school admissions examination, assumed that the applicant will be male. No doubt there are many Negroes who could not and should not become students at independent schools, but let the burden not fall uncritically

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Youth in Crisis

upon the applicant. Let the schools have right now an agonizing reappraisal of recruiting and testing and the other admissions procedures to ascertain where they need to be reformed or dis­ carded or replaced. 4- Educational Deprivation. I have, in this realm, very much in mind, of course, the admonition of the Supreme Court in the school desegregation case-Brown vs. the Board of Education­ which was the historic turning point in public policy with respect to race. The Court in that decision said that any schoolchild in this country who does not have the opportunity for education in an integrated situation is a child who is deprived educationally. The Negro child, yes, but just as much, also, the white child. If that be so, then the overwhelming number of students in inde­ pendent schools are educationally deprived. I believe that to be so. If the schools are not significantly inte­ grated communities, then the children in those schools will be denied an education which prepares them to survive in an inter­ racial society such as this is, because the most essential element, educationally, for survival in America is the experience of living in integration. In truth, if integration cannot be accomplished in the schools, then hope for the survival of this nation as any semblance of a democracy is lost, for it surely must be less diffi­ cult to integrate a school than a labor union or a congregation or a political organization or a business or a professional society. Moreover, manifestly, the independent schools of this country are in the most strategic position to achieve meaningful integra­ tion with all deliberate speed. The independent schools are not hamstrung by politically vulnerable school boards. The inde­ pendent schools need not suffer litigation before integration (except for breaking a few wills!). The independent schools have the resources, and could obtain greater resources, which could bear the costs in scholarships, loans, and student employment to enable integration. Mind you, I am not saying that the independent schools can be integrated significantly and in a way that would edify the

The Crisis Accep ted

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public schools and the rest of society without difficulty or con­ troversy. There would, no doubt, be irate alumni, hysterical parents, astonished donors, recalcitrant trustees. There would be eyebrows raised and sometimes open hostility among the towns­ people in the communities where the schools are located. Nothing worthwhile is ever accomplished cheaply or easily or without opposition and risk. There will be other kinds of problems too : tokenism in schools has shown that, for example, a Negro adolescent can be on a campus without the mores and customs of the campus being altered-though the danger for the Negro youth in such circum­ stances is that he will be treated as a kind of celebrity rather than as a human being or that he will be able to conform enough to become, as it were, a de facto white person, thereby also violating his personhood. If now, on a school campus, there be, however, sixty Negroes out of, say, three hundred students, then none will be celebrities just because they are Negroes, and the mores and folkways of the school community are certain to be altered, some discarded, some strengthened. That, though it will seem trau­ matic and even revolutionary, no doubt, is to be sought and welcomed. These are, after all, as the charter of the conference says, days of crisis, and integration in America has become the moral re­ quirement of the nation's survival as a society worth living in. Integration of the independent schools is now also a moral neces­ sity for the survival of the independent schools . These schools are justifiably proud of a long tradition of educational excellence; if these schools are not soon integrated the deprivation of their students will become so aggravated that such excellence will be forfeited. The vocation of the independent school, in other words, is not to be (as some churches and donors and alumni and parents wish) the last bastion of the status quo of white su­ premacy in secondary education, but rather to be the pioneer of meaningful, peaceful, deliberate, speedy, and exemplary school integration.

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Youth in Crisis

A CHRISTIAN VOCATION IN SOCIAL CHANGE

The realities of crisis which contemporary youth con­ front have more to do with the false starts and failures and frailities of the society that they now inherit than with their own insecurities, immaturities, and confusions. If adolescents ques­ tion parental standards or school ideals or social conventions, then that should be welcomed by adults as evidence of vitality, and encouraged by adults as a sign of growing up, and nurtured by adults as a symptom of health. If the reluctance of young people to surrender uncritically and stupidly to moral and societal presuppositions that have been previously taken for granted is counted by the older generations as instability, then that goes to show that many adults are retarded as human beings. If some students protest (in fact very few of them do) at least it is known that they are breathing. If the young do not discern what their elders are talking about when they prattle about "the dictates of the human heart," they expose the truth that their elders have not a clue as to what they are talking about either when they invoke such literally meaning­ less cliches, and thereby the young do adults a profound service by recalling their parents and teachers from aimlessness and cant. If youth balk at being poured into a mold, resist being coerced into conformity, refuse to surrender meekly to the status quo without, at least, a struggle, let everyone else rejoice that the young still possess some stamina, some guts, and some hope. And if adolescents have no faith in the Church and in religious cur­ ricula surely the whole communion of saints will cheer out loud, for maybe, if freed from churchiness and superstition and Sun­ day-school fairy tales, they will instead embrace the gospel of Jesus Christ. Any youth who does that will learn that the substance of the Christian vocation in a changing world, which still remains always in the same crisis, is inevitably, inherently and invariably one of complaint about and protest against and dissent from whatever he inherits in society from those who have gone before him.

4 The Crisis in Our Midst: DISCUSSION WITH CONFERENCE SPEAKERS

Rev. John Page Williams, Church Schools in the Diocese of Virginia: It seems to me we've had some very interest­ ing reasoning in Mr. Stringfellow's talk, which sounds quite good on the surface, but not underneath. Take the illustration of the Ku Klux Klan investigation.* I grant Mr. Stringfellow's first premise, that the Ku Klux Klan investigation and the way in which it is being handled, is an evidence of the decadence of the society within which we live. But if we live in a fallen world we've got to operate in a way which will be understood by the other people who live in the fallen world. I submit that there has never been a more clever maneuver than to conduct this investi­ gation on the basis of the petty financing and dishonesty of the heads of the Klans. It seems to me, for this reason, an unwise suggestion that we write to the House Un-American Activities Committee and complain about the method they have used for investigation. Rather, we should commend them on the wisdom of their choice. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.: I grant the shrewdness of this action if it was undertaken as a shrewd action. But, if this is the limit of redemption, then, of course, we are in a very bad way. * This illustration was given at the conference, but omitted in the final draft of Mr. Stringfellow's address. ED.

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Youth in Crisis

Woman's Voice: I cannot myself agree that the voice of democ­ racy is the voice of God; nor can I be overconcemed about "sav­ ing" democracy whatever way we can save it. It seems to me that the independent schools exist to educate. Education is the search for wisdom. Wisdom is to be founded on our understanding of truth; and Truth is something that is absolute and can be found apart from any particular form of society. I would like to see discussion of what seem to be much deeper issues involved in the problem of what we do as schools, and not simply as showpieces of integration in society. I don't think that's necessarily our job. Mr. Coffin: I would like to put a question to you. Do you see any discrepancy between having an obligatory chapel program in a school which has its investments in companies that really support segregation in Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, in a very direct fashion by supporting the status quo? Woman's Voice: I don't know if I can answer that yes or no; but I would like to point out that at the moment we live in a capitalistic society; and I do not think you can separate the investments of a given school and say these are good ones but these are not. Mr. Coffin: There is no neutral position on this. I think one can, one should question these investments. I think every university should. I think every private school should; and the Church pre­ eminently. Stringfellow asked the treasurer of the national body of one of the standard-brand churches if he would investigate the church's investments; and the treasurer's immediate response was, "We couldn't afford to." Now when the Church is involved in that type of contradiction, it is a very serious business. My own immediate suggestions are that if you are not sure of any given company then write to the president. Tell him, at least, that you're concerned. This very expression of concern from such an unexpected source would aid him to think about something

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which he probably has not thought about very much. I also think that it would be possible to change one's investments without losing too much money. Mr. Williams: Did the treasurer mean that he couldn't afford to investigate the church's investments because of the criticisms that would come, or because you do not simply ask whether the com­ pany practices segregation; you also ask how it handles the little dealer? And there are a lot of other questions. And can you tell us how to get a list of Simon Pure investments? Mr. Coffin: I think it would be quite possible to draw up a ques­ tionnaire . . . Mr. Williams: Who would be the judges to decide the validity of the answers to the questionnaires? Stringfellow doesn't trust many agencies. Mr. Coffin: I think the president of the corporation would be a good authority. Mr. Williams: Do you think the president really knows what goes on? Mr. Coffin: No, but he might be inclined to find out. Further­ more, get your students involved. If they get involved at this stage, they will remain involved. I think that a questionnaire could be drawn up, sent to the president with the request that he be good enough to fill it out. Peter Pelham, Mount Vernon Seminary, Washington, D.C. :

There are some two hundred people gathered here, and we cer­ tainly don't seem to be able to come to grips with the subject of this conference, which is "Youth's Crisis in a Changing World : The Responsibility of the Schools." I would like to submit that

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Youth in Crisis

we entertain questions which pertain to this subject, rather than committee investigations of the Ku Klux Klan. Let's take it back to the students and what our responsibilities are. Mr. Coffin: I have to disagree with you on that. If your students found out that you had signed a petition saying you thought it was disgraceful to have the House Un-American Activities Com­ mittee come up with so little, don't you think that would help them? Peter Marshall once said, "If you don't stand for something, you'll fall for anything." I think it's a feeling on the part of many students that their headmasters don't stand for anything. We tried to get the college presidents, for instance, to come out in favor of the '64 Civil Rights Act. That's about as safe an issue as you can have. We couldn't find one, outside of New York City, who would make a public stand on that. Is anybody taking any public stands today on the admission of China to the United Nations? Everybody's in his box. Students feel this. You're only free to do something when you get out on the far left, out of the mainstream of society. I really think that this is a central issue when dealing with the crisis of youth in a changing world. Richard H. Mcfeely, George School, Pa.: Dr. Malik, we heard this morning that we need to do much more to present the United Nations to our students. Christians feel they have certain right answers to the crises you pointed out last night. But the United Nations is made up of a lot of other religious groups that also feel they have the right answer. How do you reconcile the two positions so that we can move ahead in resolving some of these crises? Charles H. Malik: I do not understand what the two positions are. Do you mean that the Hindu believes something, the Chris­ tian believes another, and how do we reconcile them? Or do you mean that a representative of a government comes to the

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United Nations and has some idea, and the representative of an­ other government comes there with another idea, and how do you reconcile these two ideas? I do not understand the question. I am afraid there is a kind of fluidity around, to the effect that just because there are many religions and many points of view represented at the United Nations, or in this gathering, or all over the world, ergo : either none is true, or all are more or less equally true. Until I understand exactly the question, I am not going to venture out on fantastic constructions of answers. Will you kindly tell me exactly what you mean?

Mr. Mcfeely: I'll have to rethink it a little. Voice: This morning Bill Coffin spoke as to why Dr. Malik doesn't make sense. I wonder, Bill, whether it be in school chapels, in colleges, in Texas, or in New Haven, if you don't upset the applecart very well and end up sending the kids into a greater crisis? Who does the construction job? And what kind of a construction job would it be insofar as you excoriate Dr. Malik's position in terms of the Christian faith? Mr. Coffin: My objections to what Dr. Malik said last night were that while I greatly admired the depth and sincerity of his ex­ pression of his faith, his was an abjectly conventional approach to religion that did not try to come to grips with some of the real problems that people have while trying to be honest members of their era. To give the back of the hand, as he did, to biblical criticism, which is carried on by highly devout people (no one can say Bultmann isn't a very devout man, or Bonhoeffer, who gave his life for his belief, and therefore apparently took it very seriously) is not a helpful way of trying to deal with the prob­ lems of youth. He insisted on certain things which I would call an "expression of faith" as being the "essence of faith." For in­ stance, I think we're going to have to be a bit more discriminating about miracles than he was. Certain ones are a basis of faith, others are an expression of faith.

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The second problem was the intimation in that long list of twenty-five elements of the crisis, "Apres nous, le deluge." We Christians have a certain amount of truth. I didn't see any indica­ tion that we were going to learn from Marxism, or that we were going to learn from the black primitive forces that were rising up like a flood to wash over us. For heaven's sake, let's not treat evil as if it were something not arising within us, within our own system, and within our own form of government. I just felt that there was an unwillingness to let the future be the future. Dr. Malik, I started off this morning saying that I was sure that if we have a unity in Christ we can accept our differences. It wouldn't be a successful conference if we weren't having a good confrontation of differences.

Dr. Malik: I am greatly disappointed that I could not attend this

morning; and I must apologize to Mr. Coffin and to the others who spoke. I do not exactly understand what the source of this difficulty is. Mr. Coffin began by saying "while I admire Dr. Malik . . . " He shouldn't have begun by saying that. We are above these things. We must face issues exactly as he said. We don't preface things with "while I admire" and then blast to smithereens. You say I keep the future. What do you mean by that? Am I standing in the way of the future when I affirm cer­ tain fundamental things that, my dear friends, are going to be affirmed a thousand years from now, whether or not you or I existed? When will these eternal verities of the past not be affirmed in the future? Certainly we are living through a revolu­ tionary age. But precisely because we are living in a revolutionary age, nothing is more needed today than clarity on the half dozen eternal verities which never change. I gave you the grounds of my beliefs. I knew I owed it to you, and went ahead and did it. I would like to hear Mr. Coffin tell us what he believes. I think he owes that to us. I told you that I believe what I believe on six grounds; perhaps he has better grounds, including the great authority of his father. I told you

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what the grounds of my faith are : First, people who loved me and who, I believe, were very honest have taught me these things. Second, I believe them on the authority of the Church and its magnificent traditions. Mr. Coffin mentioned Bultmann and Bonhoeffer. I want to assure you, sir, that when Bultmann and Bonhoeffer have been completely forgotten, people will still read David and Augustine and Paul, who, I assure you, are more authoritative than all the Bultmanns and Bonhoeffers put to­ gether. My third ground is the Bible, and my fourth the saints. Then, fifth, life in all its sufferings, lonelinesses, anxieties, and facings of death. Then, finally, I believe in the Holy Spirit; I really believe in the Holy Spirit who gives us light to affirm what we believe. I beg Mr. Coffin to tell us what is his faith, and what are his grounds for it. Mr. Coffin: I don't think that there is much difference on the question of the "treasure"; but I think there's a great deal of difference on the question of the "earthen vessel." I agree that Paul and Augustine are going to be far more authoritative for all eternity than are Bultmann and Bonhoeffer. But some, until they first go through a Bonhoeffer or a Bultmann are not in a position to appreciate what St. Paul or St. Augustine are talk­ ing about. I think the question of earthen vessels is the very real question where Dr. Malik and I have some serious disagreements. I look at him with awe and wonder, that he can stand up and affirm these things so beautifully. I wish I could, in a way; although in another way, to be honest, I don't think I do. I think I believe that one is in a great deal of agony all the time, and this is one of my forms of agony: intellectual, in trying to rethink what it was essentially that Paul and Augustine and all the other biblical writers were trying to say that still carries across the centuries so that it really says something to me in my agony and loneliness and all the other things that he was talking about last night. It certainly is true at places like Yale and Phil­ lips Academy, Andover, that these earthen vessels have to be very

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carefully re-examined. We have to find some kind of vessel which will make the treasure more relevant to people today. Rev. Peter C. Moore, Council for Religion in Independent Schools, New York: I would like to ask Mr. Coffin a question. He mentioned Andover, where a senior was reported in the Alumni Bulletin as having said publicly in a conference of faculty and school people that one of his chief anxieties as a student, and one of his chief criticisms of the faculty, was that he never heard them come out and state their convictions firmly, clearly, and simply. I take this to mean that the faculty were continually talking about the vessel and rarely ever mentioning the treasure. If teachers were more open about the treasure, don't you think students would be less worried about the vessel? Mr. Coffin: All right. Let me make a statement of faith in my belief in Jesus Christ. I think that every person is perplexed with what essentially to him is the humanity of a human being. I think the Church says, with Karl Barth, that Jesus Christ is the mirror in which every man sees the humanity of a human being. Man is as he eats, in part; man is as he thinks, in part; but man is finally as he loves, as he is able to make a gift of himself. There is no smaller package in this world than that of a man all wrapped up in himself. What is so beautifully eloquent about the humanity of Christ was that he mirrors to us the quality of self-giving, which we just don't find in our own response to others. To me, Socrates is marvelous; I have a lot of respect for Nathan Hale; but Jesus Christ elicits from me a kind of loyalty, a kind of demonstration of what the humanity of the human being is, as nobody else does. From the outer periphery to the inner core and back again, he is all of a piece : all self-giving, rather than the self-taking I always seem to get involved in. Now, what about his divinity? I think it has been needlessly complicated. The Church holds that in watching Christ at work, healing the hurts of people, empowering the weak, judging the

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strong, it sees transparently the power of God at work. What, then, is important is not whether Christ is Godlike, but that God is Christlike. Therefore we can say of Christ : He is not only a mirror to our humanity, but also a window to divinity. In the person of Jesus Christ we see as much as mortal eyes can see of what Divine Being is all about. Christ is, as it were, the Rosetta Stone, both to our own mind and to the life of God. I think one can talk in these kinds of terms about one's belief in the di­ vinity of Christ (which belief, incidentally, has to be known not dogmatically but devotionally) without going through the metaphysics which were meaningful in the fifth century. Miss Mary Steinmetz, Springside School, Pa. : I find the mean­ ingful answer about our Lord Jesus is that he is the Son of God. You may call that dogmatic-but that is what I say to students. And when I have experienced it, it has been most directly and most imminently in the Holy Communion. Now, as Christians, this is the sort of thing I think we ought to say; not to play around with all these weasel words. We know that our Lord was both true God and true man, and this I am not afraid to say to my students. This is relevant whether it was the first century when the apostles first saw our Lord on Easter, or whether it is today! Mr. Coffin: I feel like saying pretty directly, "You just aren't · to the students today. " You can say " true man, true G od"; wise I know what you're talking about; I say that too. I also find Christ in the Communion as I don't find him any other place. But when you say "Son of God" and you speak to a modern mind, what does that mean? Do you know? "Son of God" in what sense? That kind of symbolic language has to be further explained. What was El Greco trying to do when he deliberately distorted physiognomic detail? He was trying, through a deliberate distor­ tion, to point to a truth beyond description, namely, the truth of personality. Personality is a mystery in the sense of an indefi-

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nite certainty. If you're going to point toward an indefinite cer­ tainty, like El Greco, you have to distort deliberately one form of truth in order to point to another, which can only be appre­ hended through signposts of this type. If you go to your students and talk about "Son of God" it doesn't have the same meanings any more. It doesn't ring the same bells with most people as it does with you. In fact, I don't think it would have done so with you if you had been born today and had been brought up in the same type of environment your students are brought up in today. I grant you, you are right for your own experience; but I warn you against being a prisoner of your own experience.

Dr. Malik: I am sure we all deeply appreciated Mr. Coffin's own statement of faith. But I feel it is important to notice that while he quoted Dr. Karl Barth on the humanity of Christ, he did not quote him on the divinity of Christ-and it is here that Dr. Barth lays his great emphasis. Furthermore, as he gave us his statement of faith, we all knew what classical heresy of the Christian Church it expressed!

Tbe Crisis Resolved CHARLES HABIB MALIK

We come now to the concluding session of this con­ ference and to the treatment which you have hopefully asked me to provide, namely, the resolution of the crisis. You asked me first to define the crisis; I tried to do that in my address opening the first session; now you are asking me to resolve it. I say "hope­ fully," because I am afraid I cannot deliver the goods expected from me, for there is no resolution of the crisis in the sense that all will be well ever afterward. A state of the world in which "God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain," a state of the world in which "God shall be all in all," such a state of the world is reserved until the end of time. The proof that we are not there yet is the fact that we are still talking about it. The resolution of the crisis, then, is simply another phrase for understanding it; for noting the signs of hope in the horizon of it; for making sure where one stands, proceeding in the examination of it from there; and for doing everything humanly possible to control it and to help the positive forces in the world to minimize its deleterious effects. The resolution of the crisis also consists in praying unfeignedly, "Thy will be done." And so I proceed now to marshaling before you a few of the matters which appear to me to hold out signs of hope. I shall 53

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marshal them quietly, simply, patiently, and without much elaboration. First, I receive great encouragement and cheer from the possi­ bilities of science and invention : the wonders of medicine which without doubt have affected every one of us personally; the won­ ders of industry and invention; the wonder of automation; nu­ clear energy and its infinite possibilities; the desalination of salt water which will revolutionize all the arid areas of the world. And when people talk about the population explosion, it is a fact, which you can readily ascertain from scientists, that this explosion can be scientifically licked, and therefore the problem here is not scientific or technological, but political, social, cultural, and spiritual. Left to science alone, the population explosion can be contained and controlled; blame then these other aspects of man for the dangers it poses. Science, then, is a most wonderful in­ strument, provided it is put in the hands of wise, humble, far­ seeing and compassionate men, men who believe something and stand for something ultimate. Consider again the fact that the finest books, the finest works of art, and the finest music are now available on a much wider scale than ever before. I refer to this cheering development of industry as the "paperback explosion." This is one positive side of the affiuent society. For a modest sum of money today you can acquire the finest library on your shelves, a library that a Plato, or an Augustine, or a Descartes, or even a Kant, would envy you for, a library that none of these men could have dreamed of acquiring. It is quite true, as all of us are sadly aware, that side by side with this there is, alas, the worst yellow-pulp literature that has ever been published. But such, my friends, will always be the case. There is always this mixture in life of good and evil, for it is not the will of God that the tares be weeded out from the wheat until the end of time, although this does not mean that special care should not be lavished on the wheat, or that the wheat will be choked or overwhelmed now that some stupid tares are interspersed with it.

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I am further infinitely encouraged by the health and purity, the eagerness and search for the truth, among the wonderful young boys and girls with whom you are dealing. Even their naughtiness is healthy and natural and, I might add, pure. I love them. I fear nothing of their naughtiness. I can spend all my life with them, telling them stories, teaching them mathematics, science, history, international relations, the United Nations and philosophy, and especially telling them the story of one Jesus of Nazareth in the simplest and least affected terms. I can have the greatest fun with them-the purest fun, the healthiest fun, the most creative fun. They are thirsty for the deepest things, and I find no evidence that they will not understand or respond to these things, if put to them humbly, lovingly, sincerely, patiently, with evident conviction, and without any affectation. No, every time I visit these colleges and schools I come back deeply cheered up. The students are profoundly concerned, so are the adminis­ trators; but some of the faculty I find wandering off into worlds of their own. Every time I visit these schools and colleges-and I do that very frequently-and make intimate and prolonged con­ tact with these wonderful specimens of health and eagerness and humanity and beauty, I remember the truth of Christ's saying : "The harvest is plenteous, pray the Lord of the harvest to send laborers to his field." And, of course, I pray. So, amidst the crisis there is great hope and encouragement from the plenteousness of the harvest, provided we, who labor in this field, do not let down the eagerness and expectancy of these wonderful youth. And now a word about the United Nations, as one of the grounds of hope amidst the crisis today. There are sections of the public, and not only in the United States, who are both skeptical about and critical of the United Nations. Most of this criticism stems from an ignorance of what the United Nations is. The United Nations, my dear friends, is not a world government and can never be one. It is what its Charter says it is: a world organi­ zation working under very strict limitations. A student of the

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United Nations can easily show that within these limitations the United Nations has, during its two decades of existence so far, done a good job: in Korea, in the Middle East, in Asia, in Cuba, ·in many situations in Africa, in the cold war, and in the general area of human rights and technical assistance. I believe in the United Nations. I believe that, from the point of view of world peace, a world without the United Nations is far more dangerous than a world with it. That is why the United Nations is one of the signs of hope, a very modest one, in the world today. Conse­ quently, it must be supported and strengthened. But, having served it and served in it as long as I have, I think I know exactly its weaknesses and its limitations. The United Nations cannot alone secure peace; still less can it alone secure peace with justice; much less still, peace with freedom. No nation can safely entrust its security and the peace of the world to the United Nations alone. I assure you no nation is doing that today. Nor was the United Nations ever intended to carry the burden of the world on its shoulders alone. Four recent developments have brought about a partial re­ covery from the slump under which the United Nations has been suffering for more than a year. First, the fact that the United States has waived its objection to the Soviet Union's and other nations' not paying their dues for the peace-keeping operations of the United Nations in the Mid­ dle East, in Cyprus, in the Congo, and elsewhere, so that at least the voting activities of the world body are no longer paralyzed. Second, the show of solidarity-a welcome show-between the United States and the Soviet Union in the Security Council with respect to the conflict between India and Pakistan. Third, the acceptance by India and Pakistan of the cease-fire ordered by the Security Council. And fourth, the recent visit of the Pope to the United Nations and the moral lift that that visit has given the world today. We witness today, then, a slight resurgence of hope for the future of the United Nations. The United Nations will always

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reflect whatever harmony or disharmony exists in the world independently of the United Nations. The present epoch is one of enhanced harmony between the great powers-principally the Soviet Union and the United States-in the United Nations. While every man of good will hopes and prays that this harmony will continue and expand, no one can really predict the future. The next point I want to touch upon is what I call "peace through strength." Strength is absolutely necessary for the pre­ vention of war and for winning it if it should break out. The forces that have been let loose in the world today are so ferocious, so elemental, and so unscrupulous that only superior strength can deter them. By strength I do not mean only military might­ this is most important and absolutely indispensable-but I also and primarily mean economic and industrial strength, political and diplomatic vigor, and above all, depth and determination in the spiritual field. War, my dear friends, is infinitely more mys­ terious than anything falling within the scope of international law. If one is sure of winning a war, and has his mind set on starting it, he will write his own international law afterward to justify his action. No victor in all history has ever blamed him­ self for waging the war he won or, in case he started it, regretted the fact that he did. The sense of guilt overtakes the vanquished, never the victor. It is for this reason that history can never be wholly just, for it is always written by whoever survives and under the prevailing climate of thought which would have been totally different had events taken a different course. It is for this reason too that the truth of history can never be wholly known by man, but only by God. And it is for this reason that one must be absolutely on top of history before it occurs and leaves him pitiably behind. This means utmost vision, utmost vigilance, and utmost strength. One sign of hope amidst the crisis is that at least so far as material strength is concerned, people appear determined not to be caught helpless or unprepared. The point about the relaxation of tension between the Soviet Union and the West, especially the United States of America, to

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which I have already referred, deserves some elaboration. It be­ longs to the horizon of hope. There are clear evidences of this relaxed atmosphere. The vituperative language used in the past is no longer the norm. There appears to be a common opposition to China on the part of both the United States and Russia. The agreement in the Security Council to which I referred on the Pakistan-India dispute, the test-ban treaty, the nuclear confronta­ tion over Cuba which sobered and taught Russia and America many lessons, and the granting of the Nobel Prize recently to a great Soviet author who accepted it: all these are further evi­ dences of the relaxed atmosphere now happily prevailing. The causes are clearly three: the horror of the atom and therefore the mutual nuclear deterrence which is thereby generated; the com­ mon menace of China upon Russia and America alike; and the habit of coexistence over so many years, so that people have grown accustomed to the atmosphere of peace between them. These are all signs of hope. I pray that they continue and deepen, without loss of principle and character on the part of the West, and without disloyalty to the ultimate values of freedom. There are other significant signs of hope on the international horizon. I refer first to the split between China and Russia, which appears to be significant and very deep. Then there has been a series of developments all along the southern rim of the Commu­ nist world: I am thinking of Algeria and Egypt, of the recent elections in Turkey, of the fact that Pakistan did not commit itself irretrievably to Communist China, and of the recent events in Indonesia. It appears that the whole great Muslim world is now gradually awakening to the Communist peril, and this is a great development. Another matter on the international horizon of hope is the fact that the United States appears to be holding firm in Southeast Asia, and resolved to hold firm everywhere she is challenged. The notion that the United States is only a paper tiger appears thus to be shattered. All these signs of increased vigor, determination, and resistance on the part of the free world engender courage and hope amidst the crisis.

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Now a word about the Chinese menace itself. There is hope in this area, at least in the realization of the magnitude of the menace, at least in not belittling what we are all up against when it comes to China. If China was a dormant giant that is just now awakening, so was the rest of the world quite dormant and is now just awakening to the significance of the phenomenon of the awakening of the Chinese giant. People, of course, will advise you that you should keep them at bay, and I believe you should. They advise you, too, that you should answer them resolutely wherever they attack, and I be­ lieve you should. People also would say that you should seek to deal with them fairly and honorably, and I believe you should. They would further say that one should trust that as they are brought more and more into challenging contact with the rest of the world, they will change and become more amenable to reason and community. I believe all these things, but the thing is much deeper than all these elementary bits of advice. One must have a positive vision and message for China. The greatest failing has been to treat people only mechanically; to use them as mercenaries; to keep them only at bay; to be thank­ ful if only they left you in peace, regardless of how they are developing internally themselves. The greatest failing is this: not to be inwardly concerned for them, not to have a positive vision for them, not to seek outreachingly to penetrate and trans­ form their soul. Therefore the greatest need is to identify your­ selves with their suffering as though it were your own. All tragedy is ultimately grounded in a failure in the order of love. The Chinese problem is the problem facing the world, not only now but-as I said the other day-for generations and centuries to come. Surely it is legitimate and vital, as I have just said, to defend oneself against any Chinese intrigue, subversion, or aggression, and I do not see how the United States could allow the taking over of South Vietnam by the Communists if such taking over should mean the whole crumbling of the delicate edHice of peace throughout Asia. But the Chinese problem will

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remain on the hands of the world whatever happens in Vietnam, whether you stay there or whether you are kicked out from there, or whether a compromise solution is arrived at; and to suppose that political, or economic, or military measures alone are going to induce the Chinese to live at peace with the rest of the world is a pathetic illusion. The only light that one can hope to see at the very end of a virtually endless dark tunnel is something of a spiritual order, whereby human beings, overcoming the awful temptation of pride and exclusiveness, really trust one another as brothers, in perfect mutual respect, not on the basis of race and culture, but on the basis of love and a genuine community of the spirit embracing all men. I wish now to comment on United States foreign aid. There is an awakening concerning the insufficiency of American foreign aid as it has been so far conceived. This country has spent, over the last twenty years, something of the order of one hundred billion dollars on foreign aid, in Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America, and throughout the entire world. Now, wonderful and necessary and useful and absolutely welcome as all your foreign aid is and has been, nevertheless, if it is spent only on dams and roads and bridges and developing better breeds of chicken, with­ out caring about how people live, what their ultimate aims are, what the values which determine and guide their existence are, then, believe me, all the billions which you are so generously spending every year will turn out in the end to be sheer waste. I find some evidence that there is a growing realization of the inadequacy of the philosophy which has governed foreign aid so far, and this to me is most encouraging. For you must always remember that while people welcome your money and your machines and can put them to excellent use, they certainly prefer you to your money: you as believing and standing for something; you as sharing with them their anxieties and their sufferings; you as identifying yourselves with their condition even if you were as poor and destitute as they, and the poorer the better. The next point is entitled by me, "maintaining the edge of

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quality over the edge of quantity." This is most important in the present crisis. How can you face, fifty years from now, the two billion Chinese? This fact epitomizes the whole quantitative crisis in every realm. The United States is going to be then something of the order of four hundred million. This rising menace of quantity can only be met by maintaining the edge of quality over the edge of quantity. In the industrial sphere, this means better products rather than their sheer multiplicity, and the excellence of workmanship rather than its cheapness and mediocrity. In the personal field, it means holding £rm to those few moments in our life of real depth, vision, peace, transparency, fellowship, power, and certainty, over all the other moments of sheer existence and drift. For the moments of truth and depth will themselves endow us with wisdom and power to face the quantitative onslaught. And in the social field, it means develop­ ing values of excellence, rank, refinement, culture, and peace, over the dark and unstable values of the mob. I am encouraged by the fact that quality appears to be awakened-at least I hope it is awakened-to the dangers besetting it, and that it is taking measures-still in a rather primitive and halting way-to main­ tain a decisive edge over quantity, and therefore to prevent sheer quantity from simply overwhelming and submerging it. I wish next to dwell for a moment on the problem of change. Who is not now preaching that "everything changes," as though nothing has changed since the days of Heracleitus, who preached the same thing? It is time, then, amidst all this raving about change, change, change, to say that because change is so rapid, so radical, so comprehensive, so heartless, so inhuman, no need is so great today as the need for a half-dozen eternal verities which never change, to which we would stick through thick and thin, letting everything else go overboard. Nothing we need today, nothing, more than something genuine and real, something full of content and power, something thoroughly dependable, something which, whenever we return to it and whatever has happened to us in the meantime, we shall always find the same,

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and I assure you each one of us is weighed in the balance as to whether or not he has found that something. I am encouraged by the fact that there are signs indicating that the changeless amidst the crisis of change is more and more coming back into its own. Consider further the need for courage today. No virtue is greater today than the virtue of courage: courage, especially, to express the truth in the teeth of all discouraging atmospheres and all suffocating climates; courage to look into the abyss without batting an eye; courage to persevere in the face of absolute lone­ liness and despair; courage to stand up for the deepest, in the certain knowledge that the deepest itself will then take care of the rest. Before the multidimensional crisis I seem to notice that people are becoming more and more courageous. In my opening address I said a word about the moral crash; what are the signs of hope about this grave problem? First, people are more and more aware of it. But, further, we ought to be in a position to proclaim, both in theory, namely, in the works of ethics and morality, and in practice, namely, in our own lives, that the moral crash which we witness everywhere in the world today can be arrested and reversed; that, far from being merely the servant of desire, reason can curb desire, grace can overcome and perfect nature; that there is such a thing as the fear of the Lord; and that the infinite and available resources of the spirit­ and believe me they are both infinite and available-can re-create man and society into an image of health and strength and beauty and perfect self-control. I am full of hope that, with God's help, the arresting and reversing of the moral crash will take place in our lifetime. With the terrible corruption all over, this is difficult to believe; but let there be one man who proves by his life and thought that it is possible to stand firmly against the current, and the hope which I voiced will fill the heart. But we know there are innumerable such men. I would like to say here that Christ disposes of infinite re­ sources of understanding and forgiveness, especially with respect

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to the corrupting influences of urban existence. Christ will under­ stand and forgive, and to both His understanding and His for­ giveness there are no limits. He will also strengthen and empower. Let no man, therefore-and this is one of the deepest things I want to say-let no man who suffers from some thorn in the flesh, from some habit of which he may be ashamed, from some hidden fear, from some special hold that the devil may have over him, let no such man ever lose heart. I absolutely and firmly assure him there is a way out. On the personal level, that there is a way out is the greatest hope. The real crisis, of course, rages in the moral and philosophical disciplines. Here there are four principal dangers. First, the radical breakaway from tradition, as though all the past was futile, as though all the intellectual effort of the former generations was in vain. Second, to be overwhelmed by ideas and principles coming from outside the Graeco-Roman-Judaeo-Christian tradition. This arises because of what I called the other day the seduction of sheer strangeness, the softening and terrifying charm of otherness. Third, the reduction of man and mind to social, economic, and material conditions. And fourth, the reduction of truth, or what the mind can ultimately deal with, to concepts, words, symbols, and the sheer analysis of language. The deepest crisis of the mind in the Western world today is the joint operation of these four deleterious causes: the destruc­ tion of history, allowing principles and themes coming from out­ side the West to overwhelm the principles and themes which have sprung in the West, the repudiation of the originality of the mind by making it wholly dependent on economic and social conditions, and dealing with nothing save words, sentences, and their meanings. The remedying of this situation can hardly be expected from within the departments of philosophy and the humanities them­ selves, for these departments have a way of perpetuating them-

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selves. At least it will be a slow process for them to wake up to their deficiencies and do something about them. The remedying of this situation can only come from outside, from the adminis­ trators themselves, feeling the infinite seriousness of the situation and intervening decisively to remedy it. Past generations, my friends, did not struggle in vain in this quest for the truth, and we should be humble before them. In fact, some of them are far superior to this generation. Therefore, we can sit at the feet of Plato and Aristotle and Augustine and Aquinas and Kant and learn from them. Themes and points of view hailing from Asia and Africa should not displace the themes and points of view which we have solidly inherited from the tradition of four thousand years. On the contrary, they should be put in their place-a very honorable place indeed, but a place determined for them by what we already know and are sure of, and what we already are and should be. Man and mind have an original dign ity and creativity of their own. They are never only the expression without any remainder of material, biological, economic, and social conditions. The dig­ nity of man is independent of all these things. His mind can see and create beyond them, and often in spite of them. Finally, what we can deal with, what we are really dealing with all the time, is not concepts and words and meanings, but actual existing things, and while words and language and con­ cepts and meanings are important, they are secondary to and derivative from our primary concern with actual existing things. It is this healthy, creative, natural, truthful attitude of mind, in its fourfold character, that must be made to permeate the de­ partments of philosophy, literature, art, and the humanities in general. In the prevailing state of affairs, only a revolution can bring about this permeation, and such a revolution cannot come from inside these departments themselves : it must be gently but decisively induced in them by the responsible far-seeing ad­ ministrators themselves. There is evidence of an awakening in the intellectual and

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spiritual centers of the world to the fact that some remedy must be sought for the unsatisfactory state of affairs that has reigned so far, and this to me is most encouraging. Thank heavens, it is increasingly becoming possible to proclaim in Western universi­ ties that atheism, relativism, materialism, cynicism, and rebellion are not the necessary concomitants of the life of the mind, and that you can develop your mind to the utmost and learn all the truth of nature and man and history and mind, you can know all the truth and be the greatest scientist in the world and the greatest philosopher that has ever existed; you can know all this and still believe in God, still believe in absolute values, still rise above the elemental and material, still be sanguine and hopeful and concerned, still obey-the wonderful virtue of obedience-in perfect gratitude. Finally, in the strictly religious field, with all respect to what some of you may think, and despite the pessimism and cynicism that I sometimes observe, let me assure you that the outlook is excellent today. Protestants are seeking to understand each other more and more; they are genuinely reaching out toward other Christians too; and they are going back more and more to their origins. The World Council of Churches has been working in the field of ecumenism for thirty years; it has been a pioneer in this realm. Orthodoxy is astir all over the world; the Orthodox are reaching out, not only toward one another, but also toward other Christians; they have been active in the World Council of Churches, and now a most significant dialogue has been started between them and the Roman Catholics. Think of the wonder in our time of the humble Italian peasant, now known by the name of John XXIII, and the new and revolutionary spiritual climate between Catholics and non-Catholics which he has created. Think of the speeches and statements which have been issued since his death from his successor, Paul VI. Think of the present Catholic Ecumenical Council and its pronouncements on many important questions, pronouncements that none of us would have dreamed possible even five years ago.

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There is, then, a wonderful new spirit of approach, of under­ standing and openness, of seeking first the positive truth in the other fellow, before damning him for his errors or for his other­ ness and difference; a new spirit also of humility and confession. There is, too, a liturgical revival all over the world. All these things give me the greatest hope, the greatest exhilaration. Therefore, I beg you to live a life of prayer. Pray, pray, and again I say, pray. I beg you to live with the Bible and in the Bible, the book that will be read fifty thousand years from now when all the books that now engross you will be entirely forgotten. Live in and with the great saints. You enter then a most wonderful communion, spanning all ages and all cultures. Never allow the world and your frailties and problems and sins to undermine your faith in Jesus Christ. If you remain faith­ ful, you will discover that all these things were meant only to test you. Live and work in the Church and for the Church from within. Take part in the great ecumenical movement of our age. Pray for it and do everything you can to further it, for it could be the greatest initiative taken by the Holy Spirit in many a century. At least say nothing and do nothing and if possible feel and think nothing that will impede the free workings of the Holy Spirit in the future in His manifest urgings of all Christians to reach out toward each other and understand each other and work with each other and, if possible, agree with each other on fundamental matters of faith. If you do these things-pray, live with the Bible and the saints, keep faith in Jesus Christ, work for the Qhurch and the ecu­ menical movement, and never be a party to impeding the free workings of the Holy Spirit-if you do these things in sincerity, in humility and in love, I assure you, you will be granted the greatest hope open to mortal man. You will not only have under­ stood the crisis: you will have helped in resolving it. For just as God creates and man corrupts, so God re-creates. The crisis is

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always ours and the resolution is always His, but His only through us. And when people ask you the reason for the hope that is in you, read them this : I beseech you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, that ye present your bodies a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which is your reasonable service. And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God. For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith. . . . Let love be without dissimula­ tion. Abhor that which is evil; cleave to that which is good. Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another; not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord; rejoicing in hope; patient in tribulation; continu­ ing instant in prayer. . . . Bless them which persecute you: bless, and curse not. Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep. . . . Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed him; if he thirst, give him drink : for in so doing thou shalt heap coals of £re on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil with good (Rom. 12: 1-3, 9-12, 14-15, 20-21).

6 The Christ of Crisis* FRANK E . GAEBELEIN

I

Early in this century Arthur James Balfour, the former British Prime Minister, was speaking at the University of Edinburgh on "The Moral Values That Unite Men and Na­ tions." In his address he discussed the things that bind together the peoples of the world-ties of common knowledge, commerce, diplomatic relationships, bonds of human friendship. When he was done, a Japanese student at the Scottish university stood up and asked this question: "But, Mr. Balfour, what about Jesus Christ?" According to an American professor who was there, you could have heard a pin drop. A leading statesman of a great Christian nation had been dealing with the ties that are to unite men and had left out this essential bond. And the reminder had come from a student from a far-off non-Christian nation. "What about Jesus Christ?" The question, of course, goes back to the first century when in Jerusalem our Lord himself asked, "What think you of Christ?" Today amid all the problems and ambiguities and responsibilities we and our students face, it is still the basic question. services.

ED.

* Two devotional addresses given at the conference worship

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The Call to this conferences asks plenty of questions of its own. "Are we ourselves . . . really committed . . . ?" "Are we helping students to discover both the source and creative role of authority -human and divine?" But the Call does more. It confronts us boldly with one of Christ's great declarations, because over it stand these words from St. John's Gospel : "I am come that they might have life and have it more abundantly." Therefore, taking as a guide this Scripture, I ask you to go with me to the tenth chapter of St. John. As we do so, let us bear in mind the ancient biblical analogy comparing the Lord's relationship to his people to the shepherd and his sheep, an analogy so perfectly expressed in the Twenty­ third Psalm. Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber. But he that entereth in by the door is the shepherd of the sheep. To him the porter openeth; and the sheep hear his voice: and he calleth his own sheep by name, and leadeth them out. And when he putteth forth his own sheep, he goeth before them, and the sheep follow him: for they know his voice. And a stranger will they not follow, but will flee from him : for they know not the voice of strangers. This parable spake Jesus unto them: but they understood not what things they were which he spake unto them. Then said Jesus unto them again, Verily, verily, I say unto you, I am the door of the sheep. All that ever came before me are thieves and robbers: but the sheep did not hear them. I am the door : by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to de­ stroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly. Many of us are teachers of religion and Bible. As such we know that one of the first principles of interpretation is to look

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at the context. And the context of this passage is significant. On the one hand, it follows the account of the healing of the man born blind, whose unswerving witness, "One thing I know that, whereas I was blind, now I see," so frustrated his interrogators that they excommunicated him; on the other hand, it is followed by the most stupendous of Christ's miracles, the raising of Laza­ rus from the dead. In the setting, then, of compassionate meeting of deepest human needs, we have this passage, pointing to the center of the Christian religion. Like the master teacher he was, Jesus begins with a picture or figure. Quickly he sketches it in-the sheepfold and the sheep, the false shepherds and the true shepherd who calls each one of his sheep by name. Then, because "they did not understand what he was saying," he explains the illustration, not in detail but by going right to its heart. He says : "I am the door of the sheep . . . . I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep." Do you see what he has done? In that profound paradox whereby he who was the ultimate example of selfless love and humility yet made himself the center of his teaching, Jesus turns the thought of his hearers away from themselves to himself. And in this most personal dimension of the gospel we discover him to be, in the words of the title of the book by Walter Marshall Horton, "Our Eternal Contemporary." "The door" is what Jesus calls himself. The shepherd, by guarding the entrance to the fold and sometimes even by placing himself across it, might at times actually become the door. But there is no need to labor the figure. Its meaning is clear from the words that follow : "by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." Next, after a reference to the false shepherds, there are these most spacious of words : "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly." Several things are implied here-salvation, freedom, sustenance, life-things that the sheep cannot provide for themselves. To each of them Jesus

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Christ is the door. As he said later in answer to a question from Thomas in the upper room, "I am the way, the truth, and the life : no one comes to the Father, but by me." But we are thinking chiefly of life-life to the full. It is, then, in this personalization of the meeting of deepest human need in Jesus Christ that we may find not just the spiritual context of the problems before us but ourselves as redeemed men and women, members of what Elton Trueblood calls, "the company of the committed." Nor ought there be any obscurity about how we may enter in. St. John's Gospel as a whole makes it very clear that we do so by believing, which is the New Testament way of expressing what we so often call commitment. The whole thrust of this Gospel is truth made personal and personally received. The striking fact is that never once do we find in it the nouns "faith" or "knowledge." Instead, over and over it confronts us with the active verbs "believe" and "know" in relation to God and his Son. Such words make total demands upon us; they ask of us not just easy assent, a kind of glib verbalism-the sort of thing Henry Drummond called "salvation by formula"-but, as we honestly expose ourselves to their meaning, they ask deepest commitment to, utter reliance upon, complete trust in a Person and resolute determination to obey him and follow his way, which is the way of love, at all costs and at all times. Moreover, the life Jesus came to give us is not simply for the future. It is a quality of life, not simply duration, nor least of all a static life. For as Jesus said in the greatest of his prayers : "This is life eternal that they might know [literally, "keep on knowing"] thee, the only true God and Jesus Christ whom thou hast sent." Eternal life is to be enjoyed as a present possession here and now. But it also has its most glorious future reference. This abundant life is the biblical answer to the instability and insecu­ rity that threaten us and our students. It is life rooted and grounded in God, who, as Isaac Watts's hymn reminds us, is

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"Our help in ages past, our hope for years to come," and in Jesus Christ, "the same yesterday, and today, and forever." Yes, the words beginning our Call, "I am come that they might have life and have it to the full," are for all of us. It is deceptively easy for us teachers sometimes to apply truth to our students and yet fail to see its claim upon us. We must be humble enough to acknowledge that our needs are like theirs and that the abundant life Jesus came to give them must first of all be a reality to us, if we are in any way to lead our pupils into it. You and I know-and I speak out of forty-one years as a head­ master-that youth want reality. To be a teacher makes heavy demands upon us as persons. To teach and counsel-most of all to live daily with youth in these times, as we do in the close relationships of our schools-is a probing test of our own reality. If we rely only upon ourselves, it may all seem quite hopeless. We know very well that youth is quick to penetrate sham and pretense. That is why, beyond alI our values and ideals, beyond our cherished theologies and most firmly held doctrines (and they are indeed important), we need to see and know and follow and trust him who is himself reality and life and who is the Lord of all we have and are.

II

Thus far we have seen something of the setting and implications of the text heading the Call to our conference. Now we go further in this tenth chapter of St. John's Gospel in the confidence that it has more to say to us. Consider, therefore, the remainder of the passage about the shepherd and his sheep. The thief cometh not, but for to steal, and to kill, and to destroy: I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly.

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I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep. But he that is an hireling, and not the shepherd, whose own the sheep are not, seeth the wolf coming, and leaveth the sheep, and fleeth: and the wolf catcheth them, and scattereth the sheep. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd. Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life, that I might take it again. No man taketh it from me, but I lay it down of myself. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it again. This commandment have I received of my Father.

At this point Jesus, who had just declared himself to be the door-the door that is never marked "Private" but is always open to all who knock-holds up his analogy to the light in order to reveal another facet of its truth. "I am," he says, "the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." Thus, without wasting a single word, he confronts us again with who he is: the good shepherd. Why is he this? because of what he did for the sheep-he laid down his life for them; because of his relationship to them-he knows his sheep and they know him; because of the outreach of his care and the breadth of his concern-he has other sheep not of this fold; and because of his continuing life-he not only lays down his life but he also takes it up again. Like a watermark in a sheet of paper, the cross is impressed upon this page of the New Testament. Four times the sacrifice Jesus was to make is reiterated : "The good shepherd lays down

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his life for the sheep"; "I lay down my life for the sheep"; "I lay 1 e"; "I have power to 1ay 1t down my l·f · down. " What is central here is central also to the whole of Scripture and to history as well. Every age considers itself significant, and none more so than ours with its movement into space, its world­ wide turmoil, and its revolution in morals and society. Over a road that crosses a pass in the Rocky Mountains of Canada, there is a massive wooden arch on which is written in large letters, "The Great Divide." It reminds travelers of the nearby continental divide, the place from which water flows west into the Pacific and east into Hudson's Bay. But the dividing point of the ages is not a wooden arch; it is a wooden cross set up on a hill outside the city of Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. And what happened there is the central event with which men still must come to terms. For, as no other happening of the past, it lays its claim on us today. To use a strange little phrase of Nels Fern�'s, it shows us "the is�ness of the was." Consider what the good shepherd laid down his life for. It was not for a philosophy, or for an ideal, or for some abstract prin­ ciple; no, it was for the sheep. And what kind of sheep? Way­ ward sheep, wandering sheep, sheep like you and me and our students. As the incomparable fifty-third chapter of Isaiah puts it in a generalization to which none of us is an exception: "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way." And then there comes the deep personal identification of the good shepherd with his sheep, for "as a lamb that is led to the slaughter," he, the shepherd himself, stood in the place of the sheep, as "he was wounded for our transgressions and bruised for our iniquities." Theologians have thought long and written much about the cross. But beyond theology with all its value is the personal dimension of the cross and its claim upon us. Here we see the measure of God's love; here we find the most compelling motive for our service of our fellow man. As St. John's First Epistle says, "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us;

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and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren." Moreover, it is St. John's Gospel that speaks to us about doing the truth. Witness must always be backed by life. "Why call you me Lord, Lord," asked Jesus, "and do not the things I command you?" We represent different churches and various religious tradi­ tions. But the great shepherd of the sheep transcends all denomi­ nations and all traditions. Says the Apostle Paul : "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." "He died for all that they which live should not henceforth live unto themselves but unto him who died for them and rose again." This is the gospel, ever relevant and ever demanding our response. The other day, while browsing in the Journal Intime of Henri Frederic Amiel, the Swiss philosopher and critic, I re-read these words: "The religion of sin, of repentance, and reconciliation­ the religion of the new birth and of eternal life-is not a religion to be ashamed of." Can it be that some of us who are committed to Christ are at times a little timid in saying, not in arguing about it or insisting on our own particular interpretation of it, but just in saying plainly what we believe? And all the time youth want to know what our convictions really are, to know to whom we really are committed. Another mark of the good shepherd is his relationships. "I know," he says, "my own sheep and they are known of me, as [and the comparison is a most exalted one] as the Father knows me and I know the Father." All Soul's Day, which is also Reformation Day, is near at hand. We may well remember that one of the great Reformation truths is that of the inner witness of the Spirit. The sheep know their shepherd and know that they are his. As Martin Luther said, "The Holy Spirit is not a skeptic." And as a greater than Luther said, "The Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are the children of God." You may have heard of the mother who was puzzled by her little girl's version of the Lord's Prayer. It began like this : "Our Father who art in heaven; how-do-you-know-my-name?" But

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isn't that what we all want, really to be known to God personally, individually, by name? A sure identification mark of the good shepherd is that he knows his sheep by name-all about them, all their characteristics, all their needs. Think next of the sheer breadth of the shepherd's concern. "Other sheep I have," he says, "which are not of this fold; them also I must bring and they shall hear my voice. And they shall be one Bock and one shepherd"-that is to say, one great Bock with many different folds. The reference to the "other sheep" is to the Gentiles, the New Testament word for whom means simply the nations or the non-Jewish peoples. Here, as it were, Jesus stretches out his arms in anticipation of his cross and invites everyone into his Bock. How then can our sympathies be any narrower than his? How can we possibly maintain a parochial, exclusivist outlook that refuses to acknowledge any who would come to Christ? As John Oxenham's hymn expresses it: In Christ there is no East or West, In Him no South or North; But one great fellowship of love Throughout the whole wide earth. Wherever there are Christians, even though behind the iron curtain and in parts of the Orient they are but a tiny minority, there this great fellowship is. But there is yet another mark of the good shepherd. He not only knows his sheep and lays down his life for them; but he also takes it up again. "I have," he says, "power to lay it down and I have power to take it again"-and this in unmistakable reference to his resurrection. He can give us life and life to the full, because he is the living shepherd. That Jesus rose from the dead is the great validation of his saving, life-giving work. It is also a reality we must know for ourselves. For the sheep know the shepherd. Last fall, while at a conference of national pastors at Hydera­ bad in West Pakistan, I had the privilege of a week of close

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fellowship with Chandu Ray, the Anglican bishop of Karachi and the first Pakistani to be consecrated a bishop. One day he shared with some of us from America his own spiritual experi­ ence. Brought up in India, he began as a young man to study the different religions but could find no peace and reality. Among his close friends was a Christian who had developed a critical eye-condition that threatened his sight and required drastic surgery. The night before the operation, Chandu Ray visited his friend in the hospital. The friend asked him to read from the New Testament, because he could not see to read it for himself. Chandu did so, and when he came to these words of Jesus in John, chapter 1 4 : "Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If ye shall ask anything in my name, I will do it," he felt impelled to say to his friend, "Why don't we ask God for your sight now?" So together they prayed, the Christian and his Hindu friend. As he knelt there, Bishop Chandu Ray says, he suddenly knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that Jesus is alive. Then and there he became a Christian and found reality in the living Lord. So another sheep from another fold was brought into the Hock by the ever living shepherd. The next morning, the patient was taken to the operating room. The surgeon put an instrument on his eyes and found to his amazement that the pressure in the eyeballs had gone down. He asked what had happened and was told of the night in prayer. The operation was not performed and Chandu Ray's friend retained his sight. Ours may not be so dramatic an experience. The Spirit deals differently with different persons. Thank God, there is no stereo­ type of Christian experience. But believe me, it is possible­ and this I know myself as many of you also know it-it is possible for us to know for ourselves the living Christ, whose sheep we are and who gives us life to the full. Consider finally certain obligations of the committed teacher and administrator. Have you ever thought that the teacher's responsibility (and how especially true this is in the boarding

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school) has its pastoral aspect? Not only in boarding school but to a real extent in day school also-in a true and even disturbing sense, because the responsibility is so very great-we teachers are under-shepherds. One of my ineffaceable memories is that of knowing at the beginning of my work Mather Abbott, who was then headmaster of Lawrenceville. I can see him now, as he said, "Every headmaster should feel that his boys are sent him from God." You who carry the daily burden of responsibility for boys and girls know very well what he meant. What is this responsibility? Well, it is a heavy one in respect to things like health and safety, a wholesome school environment, the curriculum and extracurriculum. But more profoundly it is a responsibility of another order. Do you remember the story in the last chapter of this Gospel of St. John that tells how early one morning by the Lake of Gali­ lee the risen Lord asked Peter several times if he loved him and then said to Peter, "Feed my lambs; feed my sheep"? It points us to our greatest responsibility as teachers and administrators, which is, in obedience to our Lord and in concern for the students he entrusts to us, to provide them with nourishment not just of body and mind but also of soul. For, we who serve in the independent schools have liberty to feed the sheep a complete diet, and to introduce them to the good Shepherd that they might, if they will, have life and have it to the full.

E CRISIS IN OUR SCHOOLS ·s section consists of seminar papers and excerpts ions following the reading of each paper.

Part II THE CRISIS IN OUR SCHOOLS This section consists of seminar papers and excerpts from the discussions following the reading of each paper.

7 P arental Equivocation and Student Moral St andards S . SCOTT BARTCHY

PARENTS-THE SILENT GENERATION?

Fifty years ago the socially ideal attitude of parents toward an errant son was that he was to learn to take his punish­ ment. Today the "usual" parental attitude, at least toward the schools, is "my son, right or wrong, must be right!" Pride, em­ barrassment, the desire to overprotect, the idea that "he'll never do it again," fear of negative psychological effects resulting from punishment, as well as basic uncertainty about right and wrong, result in conflict rather than cooperation with the potential ideal­ ism of our young people and the way of life officially encouraged in our schools. Prior to this kind of direct attack on moral serious­ ness is the abdication of the teaching role by many parents-the "gentlemen's agreement" between the generations that neither will interfere with the other. This silence in the presence of lying, plagiarism, and thievery, for example, inevitably creates confusion of values, if not cynicism and loss of confidence in adults in general. The parents, to be sure, had to be young people themselves in the midst of a great depression and a shattering war, a period of debunking, crumbling of values, and objective disillusionment (e.g., U. Sinclair, T. Dreiser, S. Lewis, H. Mencken). They dis83

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carded many of their parents' ideas and determined that they would not frustrate their children! But this disillusionment as well as much popular psychology undermined their confidence in the parental role itself, and it seemed advisable to be permis­ sive, especially in light of an accompanying uncertainty in their minds as to what was right-or wrong. In addition, some parents themselves are now having to learn to manage their own money, to acquire social skills and cultural advantages, and to think through what is important in a world they did not make. They are unsure of their place in their own unaccustomed leisure and are torn in their attitudes between what seems to be expected of them and the memories of their own upbringing. Large numbers of parents, therefore, look increasingly to schools and perhaps to churches to provide the needed guidance of their children. Most schools and churches have labored long to fill the vacuum created by this abdication of responsibility. But the crucial role of the parents is everywhere yet apparent. Does this indicate that it is now the school's task, under God, to try to educate the parents as well as the children-to proclaim to both, in effect, what Margaret Mead calls the "parental impera­ tives"? PARENTS-THE EXPECTANT ESTABLISHMENT

Expectations for high moral achievement are often not supported by parents' word or example, and to that extent such expectations are not usually felt as real pressures by the students. The real pressure is brought to bear, as we all know, in the area of academic, or perhaps athletic, achievement. And in the face of the silence regarding morality, these often unreal­ istic academic expectations easily lead to elaborate forms of cheat­ ing and deception. Moreover, in the absence of a dear value structure, students often retaliate against the pressure at home by demanding cars, clothes, and expensive vacations. This "bargaining" indicates that many parents are no longer

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respected as authorities. Yet despite the growth of the youth subculture, the parents remain more or less powerful factors in the youths' lives, if only as holders of the purse strings. The clever students, to be sure, have learned to "play the role" to their own advantage, rather than to go through the sufferings of a revolt against the system. In the meantime, their own drive toward honesty in human relations among themselves and intolerance of hypocrisy is frustrated, rather than encouraged, by the mores of much of the adult world. Our young people are no longer sheltered from what is happening in the adult world, even if we want them to be. They are aware of the well-publicized price rigging and other unethical practices of the market place, of the $40 billion syndicated crime industry, of graft at all levels of government, of the lack of moral seriousness in leaders of public life, of the lack of deep and far-reaching commitment in the lives of many "Christian" adults. And the disparity between values professed and practiced is quickly discerned by the students, who eventually are much more likely to emulate their parents' actions than to fulfill their parents' aspirations. Furthermore, as Paul Goodman has written so persuasively in his Growing Up Absurd, our present, usually unchallenged, sys­ tem of organized society is in fact a rat race calculated to be economically profitable, rather than to develop most adequately our human resources. Our system is overloaded with the kind of jobs that produce socially useless products, and such jobs are able neither to give meaning to the life of those who do them nor to elicit a sense of expectation from those who are growing up. The status-quo mood of the older generation, however, suggests no need for youth to create a much different or radically better world (with a few exceptions like the Peace Corps). At this point perhaps the parents are caught between the economists and the educators, between those who say that the purpose of our efforts is to increase the Gross National Product and those who say that our primary concern ought to be for maximum development as human beings. May this not indicate that it is now the

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school's task, under God, to devise means by which the parents are self-consciously enlisted to stress realistic expectations of the sort that will contribute most to the human development of their children-and of our society?

STUDENTS-REFORMERS OF THE WORLD?

In the midst of the cynicism so easily generated by the confusion in the adult world, there continually erupts the idealism of most of our students-a willingness to be enlisted in the vast task of reforming the world. Here, in the area of the elimination of social injustices especially, the student may well find himself in conflict with the values both professed (if only silently) and practiced by his or her parents. Now as Talcott Parsons observes, it is impossible for youth growing up in the American value system to be satisfied with the status quo, for the present situation must be treated only as a point of departure for higher attainments. But as the young people rush in with criticisms, perhaps with more enthusiasm and zeal than facts and manners, it is easy for the adult world to dismiss their actions as part of a "passing stage"-perhaps in­ evitable, but hopefully not permanent. So, many young rebels with a cause receive little if any encouragement from the most powerful adults in their lives, their parents, in the direction of that kind of concern and involvement which may well offer our youth their most significant opportunity to begin achieving a sense of meaning, of purpose, and of vocation in life. At this point, as a faculty and staff who must serve in loco parentis, we must be prepared to reinforce the ideals of our students, both by really committing ourselves to the best values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage and by maximizing the oppor­ tunities in which our students can responsibly act out their con­ cern. Erik Erikson tells us that young people love and hate in people what they "stand for." They try to choose them for a

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significant encounter involving issues of the most fundamental and radical sort. What is it then that we "stand for"? As our students search for their identities, we can be to them-if we are committed persons-that supporting community in which they can find both fidelity and the meaning of joy. In this crucial' case, under God, we must press on toward his kingdom, with or with­ out parental assistance.

OUR SCHOOLS-LAUNCHING PADS OR SHOEHORNS?

Some recent studies done at the University of Chi­ cago have indicated that very little seems to happen to the value systems of students as a function of the four-year secondary school experience-whether public, private, or parochial. Of course, some of us would like to raise questions about the pre­ suppositions and methods of this study. But it does raise the very important question for us : Do the families and our educational institutions all reflect both the weaknesses and the strengths of the total culture? And are the institutions of which we are a part functioning primarily as more or less efficient "shoehorns," easing our students into the adult world with as little inconvenience as possible? Or do we understand ourselves to be "launching pads" on which our young people catch a high vision of a new kind of society and learn realistic ways in their own lives to make a per­ sonal contribution to its coming? The pluralism of our culture has born negative fruit in many of our universities and colleges in that the faculties are quite often committed only to intellectual excellence. The issues of life, both personal and social, are said to be the students' affair, for which the faculties accept no community responsibility. To the extent that this is the case, and to the extent that adolescence can be an exceedingly creative period, our task is to do our work in a perspective much larger than teaching a particular discipline. We must ask ourselves and our students: What does it mean to

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be human? What does it mean to have a vocation? What does it mean to hear that we are created in the image of God? We must ask ourselves as administrators : What is the vocation of my school in today's society? Are the important policy de­ cisions determined ultimately by economic considerations? Or are these decisions finally the result of warm sensitivity to those factors which contribute the most to human growth, maturity, and freedom? We must ask ourselves as teachers : What is my vocation as a teacher in my school? Is it fulfilled primarily by communicating the details of a certain academic discipline? Or are my particular classes devoted to using my discipline as a means for increasing the amount of humanity in those whom I teach. The students know that we are concerned about order in the classroom and neatness in the school. Do they also know that we are concerned about the big issues which our nation and our world are facing? Do they know what we "stand for"? If not, we are stuck in the mud of "Mickey Mouse" ethics, and all that we may think in our hearts about the "eternal verities" is of little use. We must also ask our students : What is your vocation now? By our own involvement in substantial issues and by our own concern we must challenge our students to choose the important over the attractive now, as well as to participate according to the level of their individual maturity in helping to change the pres­ ent society into a more human environment. Perhaps if these questions occupied a continually central place in our method of thinking, some of our problems with students would appear in a new dimension. Perhaps the challenge of nurturing the seeds of a new society could grasp us and direct us to new commitment to a truly exalted view of man. Man as creator with God of order out of chaos. Man as a lover with God of all men into becoming human beings. Perhaps our own lives would become increasingly attractive and effective centers of faithfulness and identity in a confused and confusing time.

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DISCUSSION

Richard H. Mcfeely, George School, Pa.: I wonder if you have ever given your students your school catalogue, as we have done, and asked them to analyze it as to its effectiveness as a propaganda technique? This is a very soothing expe;ience, believe me. While they see what we say we are interested in doing, they often feel that we are actually confronting them with something quite different. Have you ever asked your students what they feel is the main emphasis of the school? You will find it has been your advanced placement courses, this, that, or the other thing. I think we ought to examine ourselves very thor­ oughly in terms of what we say we are doing, and then in terms of the amount of time that we devote to other than just the college preparation work. And my other question is, How much do we really know of the psychology of the learning process by which values are developed or changed? Are we serious as par­ ents, teachers, ministers in trying to answer this? Hendley Link, Kimball Union Academy, N.H.: I cannot under­ stand the particular urgency of this seminar problem. Parental equivocation seems to me to go along with civilization. If you want to see the widest gap, I should think that the late Victorian period would be a good example of American life where profes­ sion and practice were perhaps widest apart. And yet that par­ ticular g roup of parents produced a student generation that went out to save the world for Christ. So why the particular urgency at this time? Mr. Bartchy: I know that that generation went out to save the world for Christ, and that world is not yet saved for Christ. I think many parents are silent because they have been intimidated by how much they do not know, and by uncertainties they feel about the goals toward which man is headed. The particular im­ portance of the problem in our time is not that it never happened before; but that it is happening to us.

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John Mcilwaine, St. Mary's-in-the-Mountains, N.H. : I think that the hot potato which Mr. Coffin dropped on us this morn­ ing* said something about the value of introducing a bearded gentleman on our faculty who would shake up our students, and possibly bring in some other radical elements into our student body. Well, frankly, why don't we bring in some students from the student freedom movement in New York who are starting to publish information for various private schools about introduc­ ing pornography into the library? It would not be long before we would get around to New York University's spree of having the students evaluate the faculty. And then we will see the placards, the marching up and down on the campus in our private schools. Frankly, this worries me, because it is just around the corner. Nevertheless, we must let the students know that we have a sincere interest in them, and that they should have a sincere interest in the way the school is run. Let them evaluate the curriculum, suggest courses, or make suggestions if you are thinking of building a student lounge. But start tolerating com­ plete liberty in the school, and you will have havoc on your hands. Frederic M. Burr, St. Andrew's School, Fla. : The thing which surprises me is that so many of the kids we deal with are lost, and badly needing direction. Finally I just got fed up with this haircut business and called a boy in and said: "Now look, to­ morrow you come in with a haircut." The next day he showed up without a haircut; so I called in another member of the faculty, and we sheared him. I expected a response; and the parents called up and thanked me. The next day, another boy and another warning; and I cut another head of hair with the boy weeping. His father called up to say, "How much do we owe you?" I think I understand the bearded rebel with a cause; but how do you deal with the bearded rebels without causes?

8 The R eligious Curriculum and Student Skepticism CHRISTOPHER M. BROOKFIELD

REVERENT IRRELEVANCIES

Secondary education has made advances in the fields of teaching English, history, languages, mathematics, and science. Our schools have seen the importance of having good teachers who know their subject and teach it well, with some imagination and originality. But what about the field of religion? In those schools which have dared to deal with the subject at all, sacred studies or Bible or theology or religion is often incredibly poorly taught. The picture I frequently get is that of a ''nice" man who comes into class and says some "nice" things a couple of periods a week. But how can we hope to combat the natural skepticism of the keen and challenging minds of students today with such misplaced "piety"? When the study of religion is barely tolerated as an academic subject; when it has the onus of being a require­ ment without credit; when the courses offered take the form of "moral instruction" in the grand Sunday school manner, provid­ ing answers to questions that students are no longer asking-how can religion be an exciting and challenging subject to the young? No wonder they find it hardly interesting and mostly irrelevant. 91

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TOUGH, RED MEAT

I am suggesting that if religion is going to concern students in the highly competitive academic environment of our time, it must be taught as responsibly and as excitingly as any other of the humanities. The study of religion must be intel­ lectually challenging to, and personally demanding of, our stu­ dents before we can be in a position to relate to their needs and concerns and doubts. They need tough, red meat to chew on. GOOD INTENTIONS VS. ACADEMIC COMPETENCE

I would also add, however, that such an objective cannot be realized unless the program in religion is implemented by the vigor and creativity of those well qualified as teachers and ministers, rather than by the good intentions of those who have not the proper training or equipment. This means we must be concerned with two areas of competence in the field of religion: the pastoral and the academic. And these two sides are distinct, even if they are related. Of course a school minister should teach, although he need not necessarily teach the Bible; but the skillful fulfillment of his pastoral functions (as leader of worship and preacher, as spiritual counselor) should not be considered a fair substitute for a respon­ sible course of study in religion. Nor, on the other hand, should a "Religion Department" be considered an adequate means of meeting the need for a pastoral side of a program in religion. The responsibility for the pastoral side of a program in religion should rest with a man who has been trained for the ministry, while the responsibility for an effective Department of Religion should rest with a man who is academically competent as well as theo­ logically trained. Some of the leading seminaries and universities have already taken steps to provide programs of study for men and women whose interest lies primarily in the teaching of religion rather

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than in the ordained ministry. It seems to me that we m the independent schools could cooperate in this area, to our own advantage. FAITH AND SKEPTICISM TODAY

But what to teach the student of today? Ours is cer­ tainly an age of healthy skepticism. Never before have we been so willing to scrutinize our faith with such ruthless honesty and open-mindedness. The unprecedented response to Bishop Robin­ son's book Honest to God, by the young as well as by adults, seems to me indicative of today's willingness to take seriously questions of faith at whatever cost to our comfortable traditional values and assumptions. Young people today are iconoclasts (as they have always been), but more often than not they destroy because they are desperately searching for what is indestructible, for something they can believe in which is worthy of their total commitment. (I was interested to discover that the word "beat" in the term "beat generation," according to Jack Kerouac, was originally in­ tended to refer not to worn-out or off-beat or beat-up, but rather to beatific or beatitude; a generation madly in search of a vision lost in a world of half truths and untruths.) Students today want to know the truth, not only about science and engineering, but about the whole of the human endeavor, about religion and philosophy and ethics. If they are skeptical about finding answers to their deepest questions, it is because they are aware that there are no simple answers; and that if answers are to be had, they are not to be found in any one area of learning or life. COMPARATIVE RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS PLURALISM

Comparative Religion is offered in many schools in­ stead of a course in the Bible. Perhaps behind this is the idea that

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in the face of an increasingly religiously diversified student body, Christian values are meaningless in a pluralistic world. However, the danger of studying six or seven of the world's great religions is that such a study cannot avoid a misleading superficiality. Worse, it can so easily lead to a kind of religious dilettantism. A student comes to believe he can know the "truth" about this religion and that philosophy, without ever becoming committed to anything at all. Truth becomes "relative," and the question of ultimate truth becomes a sociological one. I believe that the culture of the Western world in which we live is inextricably bound up with the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and that an understanding of that tradition ought to be a neces­ sary part of our educational experience, and should precede any investigation of comparative religion. The problem of religious pluralism might better be handled, it seems to me, by offering a course in the beliefs and worship of the three major religious traditions of America : Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Protes­ tantism. If such a course could be taught by a rabbi, a priest, and a Protestant minister-each one serving as a part-time teacher­ or by informed laymen of these religious persuasions among the faculty, it would have the built-in advantage of a variety of teachers and points of view uncommon in most religion courses.

COMMUNICATING THE CHRISTIAN FAITH

How then do you communicate the depth and breadth and vitality of the Christian faith as it relates to the student right now, today? How do you reach the students on their own terms? Do you hire an eager young cleric who "speaks" to the students by mixing divinity alternately with inanity and suggestive jokes, who tears off his collar and uses four-letter words in student bull sessions? Or do you, as I believe, offer a rigorous course (for seniors, and possibly able eleventh-graders) that com­ mands their respect? Here you might begin by examining the

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Christian understanding of man and his relation to God as ex­ plored most powerfully and persuasively in the more accessible writings (usually the earlier works) of Tillich, Barth, and Bult­ mann. Then set this view over against some rival views, secular and religious, which challenge it or address the same problems from a different perspective. For example, existentialism as the secular rival (including both "atheist" and "religious") might be represented by selections from the shorter works of Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, and Buber. Buddhism as the rival religion, though far from confirming the Christian view, can help greatly to deepen our understanding of it. Students are eager to explore what they comfortably label the "atheism" of existentialism and Buddhism, and they are far more willing to consider seriously the insights of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in relation to such rivals. Students who so easily profess atheism must be brought to an awareness of the full implications of an atheistic position. And I find it quite interesting to discover just how much of the "shape" of God is visible in the void that remains when God is taken away.

INTERDEPARTMENTAL COURSES

Another essential is that students be brought to the realization that religion is not merely a matter of interest to specialists in the field. Broaden the scope of the Religion Depart­ ment by offering courses in cooperation with other departments. An interdepartmental course with the History Department might take the form of a team-teaching venture in ancient history (combined with Old Testament) or Church history. A course in religious ideas in literature, taught jointly by the departments of English and Religion, might attract many students who would not otherwise have the slightest interest in taking a religion course. Reading in the latter could include such authors as Dostoevski,

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Melville, Conrad, Kafka, Camus, Faulkner, Eliot, Lagerkvist, Paton, Auden, Beckett, and Greene; discussion might probe basic human and religious problems and various attitudes toward the meaning of man's "predicament" as reflected in fiction, drama, and poetry. A brief introduction to the Christian view of the nature of man, early in the course, would set the tone and direc­ tion of discussions on the reading. One of the primary aims of such a course should be to show that often the "nonreligious" writer is the one who sees most clearly the far-reaching implications of the "religious question" ( the question of whether life has ultimate meaning, purpose, and value). To point out that there is a direct connection between the meaning of religious awareness and the significance of man's quest for meaning so characteristic of modem literature is one way of showing students that the classroom is not irrelevant to the "real" problems of life. The classroom can be a place where those problems may be brought to light and explored honestly, and where their challenge to the individual can be made clear.

CHRISTIAN ETHICS AND MODERN SOCIETY

An alternate and less "devious" way of communicat­ ing to students the conviction that religion is not a specialized compartment of life is to offer a course in Christian ethics and modem society. The guiding principle here, I suggest, is to be open and honest in every respect, regardless of the problem being discussed. Students will not accept "hidden persuaders," any more than they will pious moralisms. After a general introduction to the Christian understanding of society and culture, the course might proceed to a frank anal­ ysis of the following areas, showing how Christian alternatives can be related realistically to them: race relations, sex, the theory and practice of modern Communism. Reading could include such works as Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral

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Society, Bonhoeffer's Ethics, Baldwin's The Fire Next Time, Hiltner's Sex and the Christian Life, and Bennett's Christianity and Communism Today.

RELIGION IS RELATIONAL

Finally, I want to make clear that underlying all I have said is the conviction that the depth and breadth and vitality of any religion cannot really be taught. Religion is primarily relational, and only secondarily propositional. The Christian faith is primarily concerned with those experiences of related­ ness, love, acceptance, and power in our lives that transcend our common humanity and make life possible . Only secondarily is it concerned with theological formulation, ecclesiastical dogma, and biblical criticism. I submit that the religious curriculum, then, must seek to communicate in ways which do not fit the pattern of the con­ ventional Bible course if students are to be brought to that aware­ ness, and to the realization that God must be sought in the totality of human experience rather than exclusively in the class­ room. Only when we can somehow communicate that message can we hope to confront student skepticism in meaningful terms.

DISCUSSION

L. Blaine Fisher, National Council of Churches,

Commission on Religion and Public Education, New York : Is there a place for the independent school if it does not have this religious dimension-of having courses designed specifically to lead a student to a certain place in his faith? The public school cannot do this. The independent school can, and the question is, do you want them to?

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Laurence E. Miller, Jr., Council for Religion in Independent Schools, New York: It seems to me as I travel about to schools and meet people who are involved in teaching religion that our problem is the teacher's attitude to the material he is teaching. If he is a committed Christian, he may be bogged down in fear that his personal conviction will antagonize certain students from nominally Christian or from non-Christian backgrounds. Never­ theless it seems to me that a teacher can be genuinely enthusiastic about teaching the Bible, about teaching comparative religion, just as a history teacher can be enthusiastic about his material, and still manage not to antagonize any student in the class. If a teacher wants to dig down deeper, and wants to present the Faith, the living relationship between the God of Abraham, of Jacob, and of Isaac, and a living relationship to Jesus Christ, then he can do this. But in some cases this is possible only outside the classroom, in a personal relationship, or in some other way that will not antagonize non-Christian students. I do not believe that we have a right to drive Christianity down non-Christians' throats; but at the same time we have a right to present it as enthusiastically as one might teach any subject. Richard N. Conner, Montclair Academy, N.J.: It seems to me that the skepticism we are talking about ought to be defined. And I would like to suggest that the skepticism is not about the Church, the Bible, or about God; but it is really a skepticism about the very things our schools stand for. That is, it arises when our schools take a stand for conventional middle-class standards; when we say we must be responsible; when we say that students should not go to the South, or should not take part in Students for a Democratic Society. The essence of the problem comes because the students are suspicious about the very nature of the values we stand for ourselves. Rev. Arthur Broadhurst, Cardigan Mountain School, N.H. : It :seems to me that we have been making a questionable assump-

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tion that the purpose of the religious curriculum is somehow to combat skepticism. I would like to suggest that perhaps the religious curriculum is to be provocative enough to cause enough skepticism among the students to let them ask the right questions that will channel their thinking in some more helpful dir,�ctions.

Rev. William A. Opel, St. Agnes School, Va. : I believe that the end product of a religious education is somebody who is skep­ tical, and skeptical in terms of a divine discontent about the structures and the values within society. I think we can and ought to teach the Bible this way. Rev. William H. Crawford, Jr., St. Peter's School, New York: I would like to change the word from skepticism to agnosticism, and want to suggest that we have to be dead sure that there is enough content to our teaching of religion in order for it to be­ come as live an option as anything else that is being presented. And I don't sense from this meeting, or even from Dr. Malik' s speech or Mr. Coffin's speech,* that religion is a very academic thing with any intellectual respectability. Rev. Van S. Merle-Smith, Moravian Seminary, Pa. : One thought has come through to me very strongly since coming here yesterday. First of all, Mr. Malik had a message for us which he presented in the form of a personal statement of faith. Then we heard a very strong challenge from Mr. Coffin. The gauntlet was thrown down to us in no uncertain terms. And I would like to suggest that, as has been pointed out, this crisis we are discussing is not only youth's crisis, but our own crisis. And we are the ones who are being eroded by all of the materialistic things that were mentioned by Mr. Malik. We are the ones who are faced with our own skepticism; and perhaps this says a great deal about why we cannot meet the skepticism of the students. * See pp. 5-20 and 2 1 -34 for the speeches referred to. ED,

9 School Rules and Student Expulsion ALVORD M. BEARDSLEE

The school is a company of those who learn, a com­ munity of those who seek. The understanding of one member is available to all; the foolishness of one scholar darkens all. Its learning is communal, its growth is organic and its discipline is corporate. Some are ahead and some are behind but all covenant in a common honor to advance one another. The student is a member of the community, a son or daughter in the family. The rules of the school are the necessary ribs of healthy func­ tion. Without them, the breathings and stirrings sag into dis­ order; with rules too constrained, the lungs cannot expand with new understanding. Expulsion is the final punishment for viola­ tion of the rules. The member is ejected, the child is disowned. Another home or school may be found, but this commission is closed. We must let you go and you must go, as you had to do what you did, and we are equally incapable. Morality can be seen as obedience to an apodictic law, and hence disintegrate into habit; as imitation of a holy, successful or learned being, and thereby can fall into idolatry: or as pru­ dence, and the lawful are the fearful, afraid to fail, or are craftily following a reward. Rules are inaccurate shadows of general moral principles, and can be elongated, thin and chill, or fearsome, blotting out the path. Rules must be labeled: Who made me? Why? Where? In 101

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heaven or Washington or the courthouse, in faculty meeting or student government or in inherited procedure? Who enforces me? To whose benefit? Can I be changed? Where do we apply for the newer model? Or : I am the final, the unchanging rule. God's rules are diffused into church admonitions and heavy­ footed civil law. The laws of the state are the lists of the police­ men and the convictions of the judge. Society-parents and peers for our poor students-projects a cloud of images, and turns away questions with custom. The school is hemmed by God above, the state beside, society around, and may be tempted to delve darkly into earth to find a local empire whose laws might be its own. Micro-ethics chews up our agony and ugliness. Violation of which rule then is worst? The favorite rule of the ranking ruler? Blasphemy is the unforgivable crime, or lese majeste of the head of the school? The most important rule, which constitutes the community? The rule which protects you or me or our relationship, protecting us from mayhem and mar­ ring and murder? The crime of crimes is to reject our common­ hood, community. So we may expel a child for leaving campus without leave, giving him in disappointment and sorrow what he was reprimanded for desiring-the possibility open to most of his peers, of going out awhile. Thus, that crime is worst which wounds the generative thrust of the school community : the trust that we want to be here, bearing with one another and learning together, moving on to­ gether. Sin is suicide, separating from the community, with a note and a moment standing in the corner, or the last departure from the gates. Is the school in loco parentis? The student criminal makes himself an orphan, returns to that heaven or hell in his family home. Why did you, member and child, colleague in community, do what you did, that you are now before this uncomfortable court? To hurt us? Why did you need to? To hurt yourself? Haven't you found forgiveness here that you must mutilate your face?

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To break our tie? To get away, efficiently choosing a crime big enough for dismissal, not big enough for committal? What should we do? Ignore your protest? Dampen your spring? Debate your motives? Slap you back sure and fast and sharp? Let you write your cry upon our patient archive's, the absorbing cotton of our understanding, our self-vaunted under­ standing? Shall we protect you from God-he's a child, my son, and I bear the guilt? From parents-children do these things and can grow from them with us? From the state-he's a minor and we take full responsibility; don't put indecent exposure on his un­ fading record. From peers-he's gone home a while and will return and we need not talk of what he did? Shall we understand what you did : as sin, breaking the covenant with God, as crime, violating a code of law, as vice, hurting yourself and us, as rebellion, learning your wings and earning your freedom, or as kicks, so laws and decency are nar­ row grist for an insatiable maw of experiment. Why do we want to do what we decide to do? Do we want to change the offender's behavior, break him and start him anew? Do we want to change our behavior? Or to change our commu­ nity, or his participation in it? Do we prudently permit some leeway in the law from fear of parents, afraid for a fragile com­ munity? Do we punish, convinced of the mouth-filling satisfac­ tion of doing the right thing to the student in error, enjoying our rightness and his wrongness? Do we rejoice in having a rule for every wrong, a penalty for every infraction and a method for every madness, a procedure for every disease? How shall we punish? Shall we limit your privi­ leges, hurt you as you hurt us-with rebukes or work or fine or hours? Shall we remove you from our esteem or from our com­ munity? Shall we, doing these or not, rebuild, and avoid repeti­ tion of violation, with counseling, and the therapeutic activity of recreation or service?

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Expulsion is a multifaceted game; parents, students, the stu­ dent himself, his emotions and his future, are unevenly wounded by that Hashing scalpel. A good moral relativism might be to fit the punishment, not to the crime, but to the criminal and to the community, so what expells Joe in December may only repri­ mand Mike in May. Discipline becomes subjective and secret. The penalty may vary by where the offender is in his growing up (will separation now make him sullen or sadly wise?), and, who's at home to receive the returning child, and, what weight will this penalty have for his future? A community cannot contain the lump of its destruction; no school is strong enough for a hurricane, but every school must consist of sinners, any one of whom is unworthy of the commu­ nity. We bear one another's burdens and walk a chosen path. A furn goodbye is the only gift we have for some or we would disperse across the plains to contain all our mistakes. I cannot be just. Law, when human, is prerational. If the ques­ tion is not "Did you do this?" when prosecutor, experts, and juries may decide, but "Why did you do this?" and "Can we help you?" then a comity of decision under God, answerable to no man, by stable and creative adults, guided by tradition, is our best hope for the ribs of tomorrow.

DISCUSSION

Miss Phyllis Bridgeman, The Baldwin School, Pa.: I would like to know how many of you use suspension as a punishment? That seems to come between expulsion and reten­ tion. Richard Baird, George School, Pa.: Yes, we do. Furthermore, it is the student's responsibility to make up the work that he has missed. The teacher is free to contribute help; and in many cases this is done.

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Mr. Beardslee: An aspect of the subject that I failed to treat in the paper is the student's attitude toward the penalty, for in some cases the student who is expelled or suspended is treated as a hero. Then, on the other hand, there are many students who are expelled by the student body, although they remain in school. They are no longer a part of the community. This may be be­ cause they turned someone else in to the headmaster. And they may be more cruelly treated than anyone else, for their peers reject them. 1

Henry B. Pennell, St. Mary's School, Tex. : How does one de­ fine "hurting the community"? Mrs. Richard Hanson, Dwight School, N .J. : If you have a stu­ dent government who are really concerned about the way the school should go, and then have students continually doing rather small things against the carefully made school rules, they are terribly frustrated. To feel that some people are constantly resisting the rules of the community, and thereby keeping every­ one else from getting on to the main job for which they are there, becomes so frustrating that it hurts the community. Mr. Beardslee; But we may all be caught in the question of what hurts one another and what hurts the school. In fact we may be having an artificial framework by having our rules in fairly un­ important areas. What would happen, for example, if you recog­ nized that in many girls' schools the most devastating influence is gossip and rumor-mongering, and if you simply expelled a girl for telling tales? I am sure her parents would be terribly upset. "She's a good girl; she's done her homework," and so on. Yes, but she has made life miserable for three girls in the hall. This is so accepted culturally that it would be very difficult to do any­ thing about it. But as far as hurting the school, such a girl has hurt the school more than the girl who stayed out over hours, or who wandered off campus because she was thinking of a poem.

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Miss Bridgeman: We have not expelled many girls since I have been at the Baldwin School. But I almost have a feeling that those we did expel were out looking for it themselves; and that if we had not done it to them, they themselves were going to do something that would push us to expel them. Michael Shepperd, Wilbraham Academy, Mass.: At our school we first go to warning, then to probation, then finally to expul­ sion. This is a long mile we walk with them. When we finally decide that expulsion is it, then we have done everything from every angle that we can think of, and we don't have any rules that say specifically this or that will lead to dismissal. Mr. Beardslee: I don't know how effective we can be if, as you notice, smoking, drinking, stealing, and illicit leaving are the "great" common sins of school life. But are these the great sins of that age group, and are these the great dangers to the school community?

IO

School Ch apel and Student Rebelli,on FOSTER Q. DOAN

The Call to this national conference says, "The school must give . . . leadership in this turbulent era of shaken standards and uncertainty." At best we all find this a most dif­ ficult job. In the school chapel we are faced with a wide span in both age and intellectual ability. Coupled with this are the varying ideas of the nature of worship in the minds of students. But we must be prepared at the start to clarify one thing : In his book, The Meaning of Worship, Douglas Horton says, "One worships God for the sake of worshipping God." If this were the attitude of our schools, I believe that students would feel a lot less hostile to chapel than they do. In other words, worship must not be a means to something else. There is a great deal of ferment in the Christian world today and knowing students are very much aware of this. Religion that was good enough for grandaddy is not necessarily good enough for today's adolescent. So chapel should lead students to an understanding and an experience of worship in terms meaning­ ful to today's student. Private secondary schools are dealing with adolescents; and psychologists say that adolescents are not only naturally suscepti­ ble to religion but their concern for an Almighty Deity is one of the most central concerns of their lives, despite the fact that this is not always apparent. When you add to this the notion that this 107

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concern may never be as important again, you begin to recognize the awesomeness of the task at hand. Along with all the other changes that are taking place in stu­ dent attitudes must come the transition of religious beliefs. Once the student recognizes that the simple forms and rote memoriza­ tion of early Sunday school days are no longer adequate, all religious beliefs become suspect and he is quite rightly skeptical. Many people are afraid of this particular state of mind; but it is a real one and gives important and exciting possibilities to the school that is willing to accept them. In a recent bulletin from Kirkridge, the Pennsylvania moun­ tain retreat center under the leadership of John Oliver Nelson, the problem is met squarely when it talks about a new "church­ leaving age." It goes on to say that urbane, knowing, practical laymen are leaving the churches in which they were brought up and are transferring their allegiance to no other Christian com­ munity because they have found the church a Bat, superficial, irrelevant waste of time. They leave the church not because they are immature but because they are too mature for what is pre­ sented to them there. Is this why there is such resistance to our chapel services in secondary schools? Are we presenting stuff that is old-hat or at least not important enough to make students sit up and make decisions? Do chapel services give real evidence of genuine strug­ gle with headline history in the world? Do they reveal a high degree of involvement with real problems? Do they deal with the gnawing ache of loneliness and meaninglessness? Do chapel services reveal to the student that not only the chaplain, but the entire school is interested in his becoming a whole person rather than just a good boy? Do chapel services evidence that the school is in mature and real conversation with God? Do schools stress saintliness in Christ or does it appear that the school is more concerned about a certain snobbish appear­ ance? I believe that unless chapel is concerned with the wholeness

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1 09

of persons, the saintly life in the contemporary world and a high degree of involvement with one's brother, it is doomed. Unless chapel is the place where a person's hiding can be unmasked and where he can come to grips with himself and his world in the presence of God it doesn't belong in the life of a school. We talk easily about "new math" and now "new English." Are chapel programs keeping pace? Is the worship in our chapels reflective of the crises of contemporary life, or does it reflect the more cloistered existence of a bygone era? Are freedom songs ever sung in place of traditional hymns? Has jazz a proper place in worship? The dance? Instead of, or in addition to, a conventional Scripture lesson have schools tried a short contemporary play (Mister Cain by Jerome W. Nilssen or Armageddon by Stanley Solomon), or a choral reading instead of a conventional "message"? I am not suggesting variety simply for the sake of entertainment, but only as a way of involving more people in the hopes that strange words may captivate someone. We may never expect all students to run eagerly to chapel. But we can bring all students to see that when they leave chapel it has not been a waste of time. Chapel can be vital in dealing with the rebellious student only if the school and all the forces behind each school strive to make chapel a time of worship. This cannot be accomplished if chapel is also assembly time or a time to sneak in announcements for the entire school. Let chapel be a place where a student can come into the presence of God. Bring before each student God's world-all the struggles and the agonies-and make him struggle for his own survival. Never allow chapel to be a place where a student can be complacent. Above all, chapel must not be the time in the crowded school schedule when the student is to "get" religion. The depth of a student's religious life is the depth to which he is engaged in the search for meaningful answers in his own life. As he begins to find himself, only then can he begin to know the fullness of the life in God.

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Youth in Crisis

To meet the problem of "chapel and student rebellion," chapel must be the place where a student can come to know God in the experience of worship. When this is no isolated experience, but related to every aspect of life, the student has the opportunity of becoming aware of the true value of life and every action that goes to make it up.

DISCUSSION

Rev. Donald Polkinghorne, Loomis School, Conn.: You can require the student to come and go through the forms of the service; but you cannot require him to worship. If chapel is a time to discuss and present different points of view, then perhaps it is legitimate to require attendance. But I think a better place for this is the classroom situation when these things can be read and discussed. Rev. John D. Verderey, Wooster School, Conn. : The answer to chapel attendance is clearly that you should have either a Mr. Malik or a Mr. Coffin in chapel. But I am serious. What both men have is what we need. First of all, they have a very clear idea of what they believe. For us in schools this has to be an­ swered. What does the board of trustees believe? Why was the school founded? What does the headmaster believe? This has got to be clear; otherwise chapel is a fraud. Second, they have to be good at it. Personally, I don't think that to be traditional is to be dead. Football would be as objected to as chapel if it were as badly done. I think we can boil it down to these two things : How much do you believe in it yourself, and how good are you at it? Mrs. Shirley Mitchell, St. Timothy's School, Md. : I am an ardent rebel myself. That is really why I ended up in this semi­ nar. If students are involved with people, in a hospital or as they

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choose, why then should they be required to go to chapel? This way they are involved in the world. At least their religion is not away off on some shelf! Miss Rosamond Cross, Baldwin School, Pa.: Perhaps the key is to suggest that worship is a way of bringing what they are doing into a broader experience in which others can share? Rev. Robert A. Bryan, Choate School, Conn.: You have to get the students involved in discussion groups. If you feel that there is rebellion, then you must get them talking. Search them out and be with them. As they begin to suggest new ideas, all of a sudden you begin to find that they are participating. That has been our experience in the last two years.

II

Sexu al Practice and Student Corifufion CHURCHILL J. GIBSON, JR.

The content of this seminar will be lecture and dis­ cussion about our experiences in the school life, in this time of crisis, with youngsters as they come to know themselves as sexual beings, and as they use this power of sexuality creatively and well or destructively and in inappropriate ways. Sexual practice is known by the student in three ways. The first way is in personal experience. As he reaches puberty the student becomes aware of his specific genital sex drives as well as the general sex feelings he has known before. The boy connects these specific genital feelings to the way he is supposed to respond to girls, and he responds. It is important to try and communicate that these genital drives have specific functions and when mis­ used can lead to unwanted pregnancies or broken friendships, or both. A young person should be taught that promiscuity does not mean virility, that the fantasy world of masturbation is indeed fantasy and can result in auto-erotic centrality, and that petting and disrobing are too intimate and dangerous to be used as parlor games. I think that the reason we should try and give this kind of form and structure to the student's understanding of the proper use of his genital sex drives is that we as adults and as teachers are called to this kind of conversation in all aspects of these peoples' lives. If we try to teach them how to use number 1 13

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Youth in Crisis

symbols, we should try and teach them how to use their genital drives. The background to personal experience and the second way in which the young person learns sexual practice is in the witness of his family. School people tend to generalize about the family experience and sneer at the sexual witness the young person has got at home. In many cases this witness has been confused and has led to all sorts of weird notions and feelings in the young person. But the witness is there and your young people have learned from it. Our job is to pick up where the family left off, remembering that we cannot substitute for them, and fill in the blanks of ignorance and make positive the negativism of the family. If the family has said to the daughter about premarital sexual intimacy simply, "No" or "Don't," our job is to talk about "Why." If the "why" communicated has only been , "What will the neighbors say?" or "Don't disgrace us," our job is to make the "why" deeper and more personal. One danger in this area is that a teacher who needs the approval of the young person might use this kind of conversation to gain acceptance as a "buddy" by say­ ing, "Go right ahead." This permissive attitude is irresponsible and destructive. In case there is confusion about the therapeutic effects of intercourse for the child I think we should remember that sexual promiscuity in the young man is probably a vain search not for a wife but for his mother, and that he should not be supported in this. Also a point of confusion that comes out of families is an ambivalence of a mother about the sex life of her daughter. When a mother protests that she wants her child to be \ pure and chaste and at the same time has taken her to the beauty parlor since she was 1 0, and has exhorted her to be sexy and de­ sirable and to date and wear perfume since she was in the seventh grade, then you are dealing with a student who has received from \ \ her family a view of sexual practice that will lead to confusion."'.• \As I say, our job is not to take the place of the family, but to try ( and understand and hear what has been taught by the family \and fill in the gaps.

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The third place where sexual practice is known and learned is in and through the culture. A great deal of the positive teaching and witness potential has been hurt on the level of the culture. The Christian Church has been heard as a negative witness to the power of sexual practice. This is too bad, because the Good News can and should affirm this great gift of sexual power which God has given and should help show its appropriate use. Some powers that are thought to affirm one's sexuality actually tend to cut away the personal responsibility and self-control by which one's power is used by that person as he will use it. The "hipster" group, for example, see orgasm as the only sexual expression. It is obvious that considerations of responsibility are not an immediate part of orgasm itself. The "playboy" group say, "Have fun, enjoy yourself and play." The place of loyalty of one person to another, the place of commitment and the sharing of a life together are not made clear in the "playboy" outlook. Madison Avenue has helped us to confuse that which we "want" with that which we "need." This has had a profound effect on the understanding of the need for self-control and self-discipline. It is natural that some adults would be sucked into this same confusion, but I do not think that an adult who is responsible to teach and witness to young people can avoid a real self-searching in the terms of his · character, own "want" and "need" understan d.mg. A ch·ld 1 gams inner strength, and pride as well as clean pants when he is toilet­ trained and knows self-control on this level. Sexual self-control can bring growth and strength to older people; promiscuity hurts the ego development. I think we should witness to the strengthen­ ing effect of self-control in the lives of people. Educators have not helped the growth pattern much when they have been weak and permissive in their meetings with young people. The aim of progressive education is always a constructive one, even when the means are ludicrously irrelevant, and that aim is to permit the human person to grow. As I finish this lecture I would like to cry out as a concerned adult and as a man of

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Jesus Christ (God himself become a sexual being for and with us) that we witness to our own sexuality and the meaning of human sexuality in ways that will allow the human persons whom we teach to grow. I am glad that the cultural fears of conception, infection, and detection as the reasons not to practice premarital intimacy are pretty much gone. I think that we can witness positively to the gift of the sexual appetite as a creative drive which can be expressed in general human experience. I think we can witness to the fact that the context for intimate genital sexual contact is in the intimate deep commitment of marriage. I think we must witness to the force of creativity and the strength of self-control.

DISCUSSION

Miss Blair Danzoll, Abbott Academy, Mass . : Are there any schools which do have courses in sex education as part of the curriculum? Miss Jean Ellen Miller, St. Timothy's School, Md. : At St. Timothy's we do have a course at the senior level that is in the religion and biology departments. Dr. Sidney W. Goldsmith, Jr., Avon Old Farms School, Conn . : I find that students today are facing a confusion that will grow if we wait until the senior year to give them a course on sex. We have a responsibility, not to be up on some mountaintop, but to get down to earth and deal with this as the problem comes into existence. Miss Danzoll: Why is it that we have failed in our schools to deal with this subject? Have we abdicated because we are afraid of it, or because we are so ambiguous as to where we stand on it?

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Rev. Charles E . Lange, Rye Country Day School, N.Y. : My experience is that these kids are too concerned about being given heteronomous, absolute moral standards that, say, on the first date you kiss, on the second you neck, but on the third if you dare do anything else you will get into trouble. Somehow we must, help them make the transition from a na'ive desire for rigid standards to an autonomous standard, which they will need when they get to college. Lewis Perry, Jr., Fountain Valley School, Colo. : Do you believe in premarital intercourse? I would like to know the sense of the meeting on this question. Nobody seems to be committing him­ self. Personally, I don't think it is a relative thing. I believe it leads to emotional upset, and as in the case of bringing a child into the world, it is an indication of radical irresponsibility. Mr. Gibson: I believe that sexual intercourse is appropriate to a relationship in which I have committed myself to one person until I am dead. Miss Margaret Campbell, St. Margaret's School, Va. : It seems to me that just as the act of Holy Communion is a more ir­ revocable act than the act of meditation, so the act of intercourse is irrevocable in the same spiritual sense. This is a holy commit­ ment. Mrs. Elizabeth C. Gwin, Jr., Lincoln School, R.I. : We have got to face the fact that the pill has removed the only answer we had to permissiveness : fear. This has made it tough to be a woman, tough to have to make the final answers. But I think it is high time we stood up and were counted. One thing my mother did not realize is what St. Augustine said: "Give me the women, and I will give you a new world." A woman must be proud of her reasons for saying No. She must want something more from a man than just occasional knowledge of him. She must want to

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give herself to something a bit more real than an evening's entertainment. I still maintain that there is a double standard, and that it is tough to be a woman. I am glad of the role God gave me.

Donald L. McRee, Phillips Exeter Academy, N.H. : I was a counselor for Yale freshmen for two years, and it seemed to me that the guys who Bew the banner for Christianity were more messed up about their sexual lives than the other guys. I wonder if those who try what they may later come to reject don't have a better chance to come up eventually with a more Christian interpretation? Mr. Gibson: I think both kinds end up with scar tissue. It de­ pends on who your Lord is. The Christian expects brokenness, he expects scars. And he also expects to be made whole. He expects resurrection. This is not to say that the guy who uses another person as a thing, who prostitutes his creativity, is so broken that he cannot be healed. I know he can be. Mr. McRee: I wonder if the one who is broken does not have a better chance of coming through? Mr. Gibson: Both of them are broken.

12

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The Role the Te acher and the Student's Inner Corgticts BARCLAY L . PALMER

. . . I leaped into the sea and thereby have become better acquainted with the soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. -Keats writing about Endymion in a letter to a friend Whether they are boarding or day students, most children project their emotions into campus life. Every teacher gets suggestive revelations of his students' inner tensions, both creative and destructive. Inevitably, therefore, we exert great influence on the outcome of those tensions, healthy or otherwise. In fact, conflict and tensions are unavoidable conditions of a young person's growth. While it is not possible for teachers to be sure when normal conflicts become pathological, the crucial thing to watch for is the child's ability to deal with anxiety. The education that fails to treat affective, imaginative, and spiritual growth as well as cognitive and athletic growth is an education that brazenly contradicts both the spirit and the letter of our school catalogues. I believe that a teacher must be willing and sensitive enough to transcend the purely cognitive domain and enter the affective realm, the realm of character growth and personal values. The 1 19

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teacher must be willing once in a while to leap into the sea of students' inner problems and thereby become better acquainted with the moral and emotional depths, "the soundings, the quick­ sands." And our curricula must make room for religion or humanities studies in the dynamics of human nature. The crises of youth are perennial, and education must become uninhibited enough to place "the proper study of mankind" firmly in the center of the curriculum. Let us, then, proceed logically through the signs, areas, and major causes of students' inner conflicts.

SIGNS OF INNER CONFLICT

1 . Underachievement in proportion to ability; poor concentration. 2. Unusual tension or shyness in campus life. 3. Crippling discomfort and conflicts with adults. 4. Extracurricular inactivity and social frustrations. 5. Excessive fawning, mocking, condemning, or self-projecting. 6. Sudden withdrawals or explosions of feeling. 7. Subtle indications of an unconscious need to unburden problems.

AREAS OF CONFLICT

1 . Overdependency on parents or adult motivation. 2. Acts or suggestions of guilt, shame, or self-condemnation. 3. Deep disillusionment about adults. 4- Physical or psychological rigidity (sometimes evident in poor coordination, skin, consistently dull responses, or a lack of intellectual and imaginative energy). 5. Confusion about "identity"-social, sexual, emotional, spir­ itual.

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SOME CAUSES O F ADOLESCENT CONFLICTS

This is by no means a definitive list. I . The tendency of parents to keep children dependent; this in spite of youth's innate drive toward self-regulation; this deep need for self-realization at a time when the "self" is too often overregulated or subtly manipulated. 2. The incompatibility of merely urging children to behave maturely, like adults, just when they are discovering adult "im­ maturities." 3. The emotionally impossible demands made on youth by parents, society, and religion (as observed by leading psycholo­ gists). 4- The characteristic adult need to avoid reminders of their own adolescent pains; hence the usual hope that "oh, he'll grow out of it" instead of the sense of duty to lead him out of it, word by word, step by step. 5. The absence (from the syllabus) of a study of the dynamics of human nature, thereby denying students the same kind of objective knowledge about themselves as they get about the world around them. 6. The inherent paradox that youth faces in adolescence : it must delay all final commitments and yet be constantly making choices among a plethora of personal, intellectual, sexual, and ideological possibilities. 7. The apparent irrelevance of traditional religion for youth today; youth's need to turn to less symbolic sources of ethics and identity than religion seems to provide. 8 . The loss of objective, sure values; leading to increasing relativism and pragmatism, and thereby putting greater stress on a young person's "instinctive" or unreasoned feelings.

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THE TEACHER'S ROLE : A METHOD OF HANDLING CONFLICTS THAT COME OUR WAY

If we admit that students do have inner conllicts and that we are responsible for "the whole man," then we must develop some sound methods of guidance. To tackle the more difficult adolescent knots, I believe we need courage, tact, au­ thentic knowledge, and the sense to know when experts are needed. More than any technical insight or counseling gimmick, we need an honest simplicity and concern for the boy or girl with conflicts. Except we become as the little children we teach, we can in no wise enter the kingdom of their hearts and minds. Perhaps these eight steps give some clues to our role-without our attempting that dangerous and amateurish game of playing the role of psychiatrist. Approach: 1 . Sense when it's time for a quiet conference. 2. Be warm but casual if the student is nervous; touch prob­ lems indirectly. 3. Don't be buddy-buddy and don't be austere. 4. Don't be afraid of any loss of dignity or respect as a result of hearing even the most outrageous recital. Listen: 1 . Listen to what he's saying behind his words. 2. If your immediate reactions to a student's conllicts are reflex or wrong, he may tell you no more. 3. Don't be afraid of silence; teachers talk too much. Lead: 1 . Young people provide some of the answers they are looking for merely by recounting their problems to an older person : it is

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often simply a question of leading them to "answers" on the thresholds of their own minds. 2. On the other hand, don't be afraid of leading him quite firmly to conclusions he knows are right but hates to face; lead him to truth, to honesty, and if you know Him, to Christ; 3. Where you lead him will be different in each case, but above all, however delicately, lead! When it comes to students' inner needs, most of us Hunk more tests than we ever give in the classroom. Objectify: I . Since the student tends to think that his problems are unique or that they are not like simple math problems ( which is the way he thinks adults solve their problems), inform him of the similar realities which adults face and that he is already showing adult honesty by facing his own tensions. Challenge: I . As on the athletic field, so with human problems; a vigorous challenge to handle himself differently may be just what the student unknowingly asks for. Challenge him to drop illusions, accept himself realistically, and live up to his true potential; rarely is any human being overencouraged or overchallenged.

Advise: I . If the student's problems are beyond a teacher's understand­ ing, then advise some expert counseling-through the administra­ tion. 2. If the problems are religious, refer to a minister. 3 . If psychological, to a qualified professional. 4- If normal (matters of discipline, academics, or morale), advise him to re-examine his expectations of himself-they may be unrealistically high and the cause of much unassuaged guilt; students punish themselves more than is ever apparent.

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Redeem: 1 . This fearfully religious-sounding word is the only word for what young people need: adults who will give something of themselves for nothing. 2. To redeem is to buy back; a teacher who is willing to pay the healthy, self-giving price can stimulate more life in his students than he ever imagines.

Educate: Don't try to explain a student's inner conflicts; try rather to disentangle them with him, showing that you have been up this sort of creek yourself; be willing to hold the basin when he needs to vomit (the stomach isn't the only thing that gets sick). 2. Let us teach students to recognize emotional energies and to channel those energies into positive, constructive action. Many students' inner conflicts can be seen as frustrations to meaning­ ful action. 1.

ADMINISTRATIVE AND PROFESSIONAL NECESSITIES FOR EFFECTIVE FACULTY COUNSELING AMONG STUDENTS

Given the authoritarian, mechanistic, and sometimes just plain repressive atmospheres we tend to create in order to prepare children for our technological society, there are some basic necessities in every school: 1. Informal time when students know a teacher is available. 2. A working guidance committee or office, preferably with a trained consultant in regular attendance. 3. An occasional session by a psychiatrist or psychologist with the faculty as a whole. Many public schools are ahead of inde­ pendent schools in this area. 4. Faculty reading or study: educators constantly emphasize

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the personal needs of students, and we can enlarge our knowl­ edge. Any school could afford a small collection of books for the faculty room. 5. Whether as sound education or as a helpful adjunct to a student's self-knowledge, studies in scientific and religious models of the nature of man are deeply appreciated by students. The nature of man should not be an afterthought to a biology course, nor the heroic, sin-ridden monstrosity that emerges as man in many religion courses. Books like Diagnosis of Man by Kenneth Walker (Pelican) and The Edge of Wisdom by Robert S. Wicks (Scribners) are excellent examples of the desperately needed work of synthesis among the divergent views of man current today. Humanities courses are insufficient : curriculum reform must go much further. 6. Extracurricular opportunities are often given much lip­ service, but not so often the challenge and guidance that young students need from faculty. Each adolescent ego needs individual scope for his or her energy. Since most children will not make varsity teams, it is crucial that we do not invest all our school spirit in athletic endeavors; a shocking number of our students today have next to no hobbies or creative enthusiasms. For the young person who is wrapped up in himself and whose conflicts are caused by indigestion of self-centered appetites, getting off campus into the realities of poverty, delinquency, and depriva­ tion is often excellent therapy as well as education.

CONCLUSION

There are many obstacles to what I am suggesting. Skepticism among teachers ranges from their sometimes justified mockery of psychological scientism and jargon to defensiveness about psychoanalytical symbolism that only "harps their fears aright." But when many teachers and administrators Hinch from telling parents a few home truths, it is often because they have

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no authoritative and proven weapon with which to state ex­ plicitly to parents their crucial educative role. It is only when the student breaks down, usually, that he gets any technical attention to his inner self; only when he is in real trouble on campus do we burst the barrier of our inhibitions to talk with him in honest, personal, moral, or "emotional" terms. Then all at once we see his actual academic performance as sub­ ordinate to his inner growth as a self-motivated, self-regulated human being. Suddenly the priorities are in focus. Instead of psy­ chological inquiry being a deterministic jargon of unsympathetic labels, we see in a flash its usefulness as a tool of comprehension among the paradoxes and disguises of youthful behavior. Perhaps the word "care" sums it all up. With ever increasing population, prestige, and academic pressure on our campuses, our capacity to care for students will matter more than ever. Care implies an essentially religious attitude, an attitude and a role of love.

DISCUSSION

Ronald E. Jones, Birch-Wathen School, New York: How do we help students like this deal with the problem of de­ feat? They are all going to have defeats in their later life. Mr. Palmer: Just last Saturday I had a soccer captain cry for fifteen minutes after a game we lost, and what really bothered him most was that he had let his team down. Many boys would think that there was something wrong with the captain crying his eyes out for fifteen minutes. I just stayed with him. In fact, I was thrilled that he could cry instead of shutting out that feel­ ing of disappointment with himself and forcing those feelings to come out in some other negative, destructive way. We must learn to use these defeats creatively. Too often we have avoided the reality of the student's emo-

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tional dynamics. We have asserted his rational capacity to im­ prove himself, as if by pulling on his cognitive bootstraps, he could lift himself out of the gravitational field of his nature and nurture. I often think of Jesus' words: "I am come that they might have life and have it more abundantly." This is what a teacher must in effect say. This is his Hippocratic Oath. Alexander MacNutt, Friends Council on Education : I am more concerned with teacher attitudes than with means or processes by which we can solve some of the students' problems. It is im­ portant that all teachers see themselves as having psychological responsibility for the students. We fail to realize that we have the unique opportunity of being more objective than a parent can ever be. We can have a love for our students similar to parental love, but without the anxiety, and the tensions which a parent inevitably has because of his closeness to the child. If we can remember this, we can be of greater help than their parents themselves. But if we act too much like their parents, they will shun us as they do their own parents. Rev. Peter K. Haile, Stony Brook School, N.Y. : I would like to recommend the National Defense Education Act Institute in Guidance and Counseling. As you probably know, they have been opened up to private-school teachers. One of the things we discussed was whether you can shift from your role of teacher to that of counselor. I am absolutely convinced that you can. Yet it seems to me that we get so involved in the next thing to do, to keep the school going, to prepare for tomorrow's classes, that we start saying, "I don't have time to talk to you." I would even say that there are times when we should take the initiative with a boy or girl who we feel needs help. Mrs. Edith Lowry, Mt. Vernon Seminary, Washington, D.C. :

I wonder if we are really using the riches of the curriculum we have to help youngsters outside of themselves, to get out and see

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what the problems of man have always been? I would be more happy about what Mr. Palmer had said if he had had a little bit more enthusiasm for the findings of the original philosophers, the Greek heritage. Mr. Palmer: I believe in the classics. I have an honors reading seminar every Sunday evening for an hour and a half in the classics. But there are certain dangerous patterns of thought in our culture which stem from the classics. For instance, the Platonic mind-body dualism got into Christianity and diseased it so that we don't understand St. Paul's use of the word "flesh" as opposed to the word "spirit." These children live in a culture in which they really imagine that if you talk about love and boys and girls and problems like that, you mean "sex." There is this terrible dichotomy in our thinking about the things of the spirit and the mind as opposed to the things of the body. That is why I think that the new insight, the Hebrew insight, the psycho­ somatic insight really does cut across some classical thinking. That is where my reservations are in this matter.

Part III THE STUDENTS FACE THE CRISIS

13 The Crisis as We Saw It ROY W. TOWL

I shall preface my comments by stating three distinct limits which define my brief remarks. In the first place, I was not able to attend either the lectures or the seminars of these last two days. I feel, therefore, a bit precarious about what I might say and about its possible relevance. Second, the bulk of my comments stem from three years of exciting and hectic growth at a unique preparatory school. If the generalizations I draw and the specific events upon which I base them are not always ap­ plicable to your schools or to your classes, I ask you to bear with me. Finally, I have been asked to address myself in a personal way to several aspects of youth, to my own especially. To speak in public of one's motivations and philosophy I find a difficult and humbling task, for one is asked to express verbally that which he would hope to express primarily through the course of his life. The motivations, so-called, upon which I presently base my life have their roots in a permeating and enduring Quaker tradition. I have been raised the son of convinced Friends, educated in a Friends' preparatory school, and am now studying at Earlham, which I feel to be the Society of Friends' strongest and most closely allied college. The diverse challenges to service and to spiritual awareness imposed by this tradition constitute a force of will which is not easily denied. There are, of course, moments in

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which one's actions seem so strongly to contradict faith or will as to cause serious doubt and even despair. I believe I must act in such a way as to honor that spirit of life which we feel to be the undeniable birthright and the possible glory of each man. My question is whether, in keeping with that which moves me, I am indeed able to move at all. And I can see the world only in this light. It is for each man to determine his own response to both the world and its moral order, to his fellows and to his spirit. He then must live, com­ pletely, with full agony and full joy. For me personally, that life must have a measure of self-assurance and a certain, relatively consistent degree of social and religious commitment. I am strongly influenced at this juncture of my life by the essential Christian paradox, "I am in order that I may become." I find it inaccurate to use the term "crisis" for the condition of contemporary secondary school students. If there does exist a critical shifting of values and of patterns of thought, then such a shift has its focus at a far more weighty center within the society. I believe such a shifting process does exist, and that in varying degrees students reflect every face of that shift. What is at once distressing and challenging are the extremes and un­ certainties which mark that reflection. What might be some characteristics of that reflection, as I see it now, and as I saw it ffien as a student? First, both socially and from within their own souls, there are imposed upon students today incredible pressures, ones which I doubt their parents or teachers in their turn could have responded to with any more facility or constructiveness. Second, and as a consequence, it appears to me that the seeming inability of so many students to construct those taxing but viable guidelines upon which strong lives depend is not so much a mark of some­ thing congenitally wrong with the students as it is a mark of an over-all social weakening. Third, our reflection seems a curious admixture of youthful rebellion and skepticism with a frustration and pessimism which we would find a cause for sadness in adults,

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but which we find a cause for alarm in students. For sensitive children who must mature within the context of the threat of world annihilation, amidst world political upheavals, and amidst spreading moral relativism and uncertainty, it is exceedingly painful to conceptualize a useful and optimistic world-view. I don't think this need be understated or de-emphasized as either a popular notion or as sensationalism. In light of his tentative and fragile world-view our student seeks to place the matters of his conscience within a conceptual framework of "felt" obligations to his fellows. How shall young people be helped to develop a plausible and realistic outlook which yet allows room for their inherent desire to have hope? Fourth, it seems to me that in service work lies the major grounds for contemporary youth's own answer to the crises they reflect. In service projects, in meeting the so-called real world, the students discover others and also uncover from discussion and experience possible solutions to their persisting questions of inner direction. In view of these needs, it seems to me that students must be given, with all the tenderness and compassion which their teachers and administrators can muster, every possible chance to decide both the directions they shall follow and the conse­ quences they pay for their own misdirection. In so doing, students are assisted in understanding their personal strengths and in measuring their own well-springs of confidence. This is indeed crucial. It is as if, in order to be assured of self-fulfillment and genuine commitments, students today must mature at least five years ahead of themselves. In this task they need and request understanding and support, and above all, example. I believe there can be little better assistance for today's young people than the example of a courageous man who is able to continue and to persevere; who is able, as Elton Trueblood mentions, to "de­ cide for the difficult." Whether in Peace Corps, Vista, or Job Corps, whether in teaching or studying, or in business, a large number of my school friends have gone on from solid beginnings made during their

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school years. Each attempted, while at school, to answer his sometimes urgent desire to be purposeful in his own way. Perhaps this answer was sought after by registering protest against dis­ crimination or nuclear proliferation, by working with mentally retarded patients in a Philadelphia hospital, by participating in religious conferences of fellowship and exploration, such as those at Buck Hill, or by attending weekend workcamps, or by teaching during the summer months. But no doubt, in each case, each person asked of himself, "What am I doing, why am I doing it, and where shall I go with what I have done?" Within the school itself, students sought to work together in committees or governments to learn how fellowship might work in a practical way. Or they assisted in setting up affiliation programs with their counterparts in Russia, Germany, France, or Mexico. And the list continues, as does the number of students who, through acting upon their own troubled and tentative beliefs, find them becom­ ing increasingly solid and useful through participation in the ongoing world. The beginning has its ups and downs in the life of a school. Some of these schools are exceptional, others have yet to catch up. For me, George School was exceptional. For all the anger which my growing up vented against it, for all the joy with which I .Jeft it, this school has exercised a challenge to, and a control of, what I consistently feel to be right and true. And this to an extent which I doubt I shall trace fully. It has influenced my vocational plans, such that I hope now to return as a teacher into the ranks of Quaker education. As was true several years ago, George School's present character and progress are due in very large part to its headmaster. His example of courage and will were of constant benefit to those seeking guidance, as was his patience and genuine compassion a saving grace in many times of individual crisis. My remarks this evening intend to be as much a note of my gratitude to Richard Mcfeely as they are intended to be a few reflections of one boy's adolescence. If they do either, then I shall feel the effort rewarding.

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HELEN SHOEMAKER REA

As a child of a very Christian home, I have beeh ex­ posed and re-exposed to the Christian faith by its finest example. It is often assumed that such children turn out in one of two ways: either they become Christians automatically, "oozing" by some process of osmosis into the Church, or they rebel, cut loose, and want nothing more to do with religion. I was a third variety. I participated in church activities, taking in a second-hand way what my family and church offered. I knew that by comparison to my parents I was merely going through the motions; for I could see that they felt a joy and an enthusiasm about what they were doing which I did not have. So as I grew into a teen-ager, and "youth's crisis" began to beset me, I realized that there was no meaning in all of this to me. I was a phony. I really didn't care very much about anything, except perhaps my gay social life; and as I began to grapple with some of the bigger questions, a strange confusion and anxiety crept in. I began to be lonely. Meaning, I decided, was something that one found only as an adult; so I put up with my state of mind, deciding, in spite of my Christian exposure, that it was all useless. When I was sixteen, I heard a very famous man preach one summer night. This man said just this : Whatever life was for me, Christ could answer it. I was given an opportunity to make a decision as to whether I wanted this personal relationship with Christ, and I accepted, feeling, in all honesty, that I had nothing to lose. I do not believe in "overnight" conversions. God often takes a very long time to undo what we have done to ourselves. But I do believe that when God takes hold of our lives in this personal way, we can be, and are, transformed. And, although the crisis of my youth was not a very big one, God cared enough to meet it. I can honestly say that from that moment of acceptance, I have

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never since felt that life was meaningless. If my crisis had been a bigger one, I believe that God would have answered that, too. That evening's challenge to confront God in my own life led me to the place where solutions to my particular problems could be found. I believe that you and I can help to solve youth's crisis today by sharing with them on a personal level the faith which we may have found for ourselves. I am presently working with a group called Young Life Campaign, which has as one of its many projects a Christian outreach in the slums of New York City. I have found that nothing is quite as effective in these neighborhoods as sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ through honest friendship with the teen-agers. For many of these kids, we are the first persons who have ever cared on that level. We are neither social workers nor clergy. We are simply friends, trying to share with them what our Lord has done for us. The results are long and hard in coming, but they are wonderful when they do. Take Regina, beset with an impossibly unhappy family situa­ tion, one of eight children in the home. Regina found Christ through her exposure to Young Life, and began to pray for her family. After much suffering and self-sacrifice on her part, her fjther began to respond to the love she was showing for him. He quit drinking, and began to be a real father to his children. Gradually he has become so involved with his newfound faith that he has learned to share it with others and is now taking responsibility for other people in the neighborhood. I have watched the transformation in this man's life, and I am con­ vinced that apart from God's power in the life of this man, such a fantastic change could never have taken place. Regina's younger sister has recently become involved, and all of us now pray for her mother, who is in great need. Regina is one of hundreds of teen-agers in a crisis. Her prob­ lems are no worse than those of many kids from better homes. But someone had to tell Regina where she could go for help. She and

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I were both given the privilege of answering a personal challenge in the face of our very personal needs. Intellectual answers have little power without a vital relationship to God. And a relation­ ship with God is contagious. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I would beg each of you to build the kind of relationships with the young people in your care that allow you to share with them the deepest things in your lives. Give them an opportunity to hear about a Lord who cares for them as and where they are. Give them the sort of chance, as Regina and I have had, to choose. This was the best decision of our lives.

GEORGE W. RENWICK

My first three years in prep school can best be de­ cribed as challenging, very challenging. Troops in Little Rock, racketeering in labor unions, the first Soviet satellite in space, and the first Soviet I.C.B.M.: these significant events and many others provided the background for my early school experiences. These first years saw the dawn of a new awareness for me. My mind began to entertain ideas which radically contradicted each other. I was stimulated and confused by teachers, men of intel­ ligence and integrity whom I respected, advocating diametrically opposed viewpoints. I was bored by teachers who cared little for their subjects. I was disgusted by teachers whose values seemed nonexistent. I was perplexed by the contrast between the dignity and moral integrity of my roommate, and the moral indifference and hardship caused by another dose friend. I was disappointed by a church whose ministers cared, but did not understand our problems and the questions we were asking. During my senior year, I was fortunate enough to do some counseling. For some reason, students would come to my room,

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usually after midnight, sometimes with tears in their eyes. I learned a great deal from them. Most vividly, and most tragically, I saw the lack of communication between them and the faculty and administration. Behind most of the problems and questions these boys expressed were the questions: "Why am I here?" "Where am I going?" "Who am I?" These problems of identity and role definition are crucial. And even though these questions may never be totally resolved, these boys I knew and talked with had virtually no way even to cope with them. For they lacked the most basic of fundamental values and criteria. / /The point that came clear was this: Youth today knows more, sees more, experiences more, than the youth of any previous generation. Much that we know, see, and feel contains inherent contradictions, ambiguities, incoherence: in one evening we can marvel at Macbeth, view the earth from outer space, walk into and hopefully return from the twilight zone, and sense the heat and horror of Vietnam, the Congo, and the Dominican Republic. Our elders, it seems, confront the same onslaught of diverse ideas and disturbing events, often apparently with no more maturity, insight, perspective, or healthy excitement than do we. Thus, what they communicate to us is often ambiguity and hypocrisy. But to whom are we to turn if we cannot turn to parents and teachers for advice as we attempt to chart a path through this jungle? Philosophy seems preoccupied with word games. The­ ology is either answering questions we are not even asking, or adrift in its own uncertainties. Science today is dealing more and more in the realm of probability and relativity, and is incapable of providing the positive affirmations and meaning which we seek. Chaos is all that most of us see. Hence our lack of purpose and lack of direction, our lack of values, or more precisely our conllicting values. If our basic needs, then, are an understanding of ourselves, a purpose, a direction, a goal, where are we to find them? I have found them in Jesus Christ. I have found them and a

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great deal more. I am convinced that the potential of the gospel of Christ is unlimited, and the resources of God inexhaustible. My basic convictions are these : ( 1 ) there is a God, a God who is very much alive, despite recent, self-conscious, attempts to pronounce him dead; (2) God loves us, each of us individually; this amazes me, but I am continually reconvinced of its truth. (3) God created each of us to be in a close, dynamic, working rela­ tionship with himself; (4) God expressed this love most de­ cisively and made possible this relationship through Jesus of Nazareth. How can this be relevant to the prep school student? I believe in this way: Christ gives coherence to our lives, to the disparate ideas, events, and emotions of which we are aware. In fact, apart from this relationship with God who orders the world, who generates and sustains life, there can be no such coherence. Faith in Christ provides a comprehensive world-view, in terms of which to see the myriad of "isms" that consistently and greedily surround us. For Christ becomes the reference point outside the chaos and, very significantly, inside the chaos, too. And all of this promises us a confidence, a vital hope, that Christ is Lord of the universe and Lord of our lives, and that, ultimately, all things do have positive meaning and coherence. It promises a ful­ fillment, and a freedom, which can only result from the knowl­ edge and the experience of doing that for which we were orig­ ina111y created. And the Christian is empowered by God to do just this. He is not given ethical exhortations without an explanation of how it is possible to achieve the same. He is not called upon to exemplify Christian principles, without being introduced to the only Person in history ever perfectly to have exemplified them, the Person without whom it is impossible for him to do the same. No, he is given the power of God. What I am speaking about is a radical reorientation, reintegra­ tion, redirection of life. Despite what some will argue, this is not too idealistic. I have seen it and I have experienced it. More-

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over, if the educator's responsibility is to the whole man, then we have been too concerned about the intellect and have forgot­ ten the spirit. But this spirit needs every bit as much nurture as does the intellect. Yet somehow most faculty members have not been willing to discuss such topics with their students-students who want and very much need the benefit of their experience, their perspective, and their faith. Our situation, then, is that we live in a world which we know to be tragically fragmented, and which we recognize may very well destroy itself. But this is a world in which we understand little very deeply, and over which we have little control. I submit that what we need in this situation, as we confront our crises, is a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. This means that we must have an accurate, honest presentation of the gospel. We must be helped to know the authority, the authenticity, and the power of the Scriptures. And those of you in prep schools have a re­ sponsibility to make this known to us, to talk openly and honestly with us, to create a sense of cooperation and common endeavor. For, after all, aren't we all engaged in the common endeavor of life? And aren't we all lost until we meet its Master?

Reading Suggestions

I,

THE CRISIS DEFINED

Malik, Charles H. Christ and Crisis. Grand Rapids : Wm. B. Eerdmans, I 962. ---. Man in the Struggle for Peace. New York : Harper & Row, 1 963 . 2,

THE CRISIS REVEALED

Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Divine Milieu. New York : Harper & Row, 1 960. ---. The Phenomenon of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1 959· 3·

THE CRISIS ACCEPTED

Stringfellow, William. Instead of Death. New York: The Sea­ bury Press, 1 963. ---. My People Is the Enemy. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Book, I 964---. A Public and a Private Faith. Grand Rapids : Wm. B. Eerdmans, I 962. 141

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Youth in Crisis THE CRISIS IN OUR MIDST

Lewis, C. S. The Abolition of Man. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1947.

6.

THE CHRIST OF CRISIS

Gaebelein, Frank E. Christian Education in a Democracy. New York : Oxford University Press, 1951. ---. The Pattern of God's Truth. New York: Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 1954. 7.

PARENTAL EQUIVOCATION AND STUDENT MORAL STANDARDS

Cox, Harvey. The Secular City. New York : The Macmillan Company, I 964. Erikson, Erik H. (ed.). The Challenge of Youth. Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Book, 1965 (Daedalus, Winter 1961). Friedenberg, Edgar. The Vanishing Adolescent. New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1959. 9oodman, Paul. Growing Up Absurd. New York : Random House Vintage Book, 1960. 8.

THE RELIGIOUS CURRICULUM AND STUDENT SKEPTICISM

Brookfield, Christopher M. "Experiment in Religion and Litera­ ture : Exploring Their Interrelationships" and "Re­ ligious Ideas in Modern Literature : Suggested Read­ ing for Class Discussion," in The Independent School Bulletin. Boston : National Association of In­ dependent Schools, November, 1964 and January, 1965. (Course outline and bibliography.)

Reading Suggestions

143

"Curriculum Suggestions and Teaching Aids in Religion for the Non-Sectarian School." New York: Council for Re­ ligion in Independent Schools, 1 963. Johnson, Sherman E. "The Place of Theology in the Curriculum of a Church-Related School," in Schools and Schblar­ ship (The Christian Idea of Education: Part 2), Ed­ mund Fuller (ed.) . New Haven : Yale University Press, 1 962. Tillich, Paul. "Theology of Education," in The Church School in Our Time (a symposium) . Concord, N.H.: Centennial Publication of St. Paul's School, 1 956. 9•

SCHOOL RULES AND STUDENT EXPULSION

Beardslee, Alvord M. "Religion and Values," in Independent School Operation, William Johnson (ed.). Prince­ ton: D. Van Nostrand Co., Inc., 1 96 1 . Neill, A. S. Summerhill. New York : Hart, 1 960. IO.

SCHOOL CHAPEL AND STUDENT REBELLION

Ginzberg, Eli (ed.). Values and Ideals of American Youth. New York : Columbia University Press, 1 96 1 . Gordh, George. Christian Faith and Its Cultural Expression. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1 962. Horton, Douglas. The Meaning of Worship. New York : Harper & Row, 1 959. Josselyn, Irene M. The Adolescent and His World. New York: The Family Service Association of America, 1 952. l I.

SEXUAL PRACTICE AND STUDENT CONFUSION

Dickerson, Roy E. Into Manhood. New York: Association Press, 1954. Duval, Evelyn M. Love and the Facts of Life. New York: Asso­ ciation Press, 1 963.

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Youth in Crisis

Pike, James A. If You Marry Outside Your Faith. New York : Harper & Row, 1954The Warner Sex Education Booklets. St. Louis : Concordia Press, 1963. I 2,

THE ROLE OF THE TEACHER AND THE STUDENT'S INNER CONFLICTS

Barker, C. Edward. Psychology's Impact on the Christian Faith. Hollywood-by-the-Sea, Fla.: Transatlantic, 1964. Blas, Peter. On Adolescence. New York: The Free Press, 1961. Erikson, Erik H., "Identity and the Life Cycle." Psychological Issues, Vol. I, No. 1, International Universities Press, 1959· Freud, Anna. Psychoanalysis for Parents and Teachers. Boston: Beacon Press, 1960.

About the Contributors

JR., is Chaplain of Yale University. He has served as Chaplain of Phillips Academy, Andover, and Williams College. A wartime Army intelligence officer, he has been closely associated with the civil rights move­ ment and the Peace Corps. WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN,

former Headmaster of the Stony Brook School, Long Island, is co-editor of Christianity Today. He has served as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Council for Religion in Independent Schools. FRANK E . GAEBELEIN,

is Professor of Philosophy at the American University in Beirut. He holds more than a dozen honorary degrees, and is a former President of the General Assembly of the United Nations. CHARLES HABIB MALIK

a noted Episcopal layman, is a partner in the law firm of Ellis, Stringfellow and Patton, which devotes much of its service to the underprivileged of New York City. He is widely known as a lecturer and an author. WILLIAM STRINGFELLOW,

s. SCOTT BARTCHY is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and Chaplain at Dana Hall School, Massachusetts. former Director of the Coun­ cil for Religion in Independent Schools, is Chaplain of Hollins College, Virginia. ALVORD M. BEARDSLEE,

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Youth in Crisis

holds degrees from Princeton and Columbia universities and is Instructor of Religion and English at Phillips Exeter Academy, New Hampshire. CHRISTOPHER M. BROOKFIELD

Q. DOAN received degrees from Lafayette Col­ lege and Princeton Theological Seminary and is Chaplain at Blair Academy, New Jersey. FOSTER

is Chaplain at St. Stephen's School, Virginia. He is a graduate of the University of Virginia. CHURCHILL J. GIBSON, JR.,

received the M. A. degree from Oxford University, and presently is teacher of Religion and Eng­ lish at the Shady Side Academy, Pennsylvania. BARCLAY L. PALMER

is a graduate of Chatham Hall, Virginia, and Goucher College, Maryland. HELEN SHOEMAKER REA

GEORGE w. RENWICK is a graduate of Shattuck

School, Minnesota, and Williams College, Massachusetts. He served on the Williams-in-China program and is a student at Princeton Theological Seminary. w. TOWL is a graduate of the George School, Pennsylvania, and a student at Earlham College, Indiana. ROY

$2.00

YOUTH IN CRISIS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE SCHOOLS Edited by Peter C . Moore In both school and community relationships, the student of today is involved in complex decisions which often overwhelm him. The school must give more leadership in the turbulent era of shaken standards and uncertainty. This leadership must be rooted in the enduring values of life, and must be so presented that young people will accept them and strive to live by them. -Youth in Crisis This book is the lively report of a conference sponsored by the Coun­ cil for Religion in Independent Schools to consider the problems of young people and the means of providing them adequate leadership. The analysis of the general subject and the discussion of the specific issues will be helpful and stimulating to counselors, educators, and parents. • The Crisis Defined Charles H. Malik, former President of the General Assembly of the United Nations, is now Professor of Philoso­ phy at The American University in Beirut. • The Crisis Revealed Yale University.

William Sloane Coffin, Jr., is Chaplain of

• The Crisis Accepted William Stringfellow, noted lay theologian and author of Free in Obedience and My People Is the Enemy, is a member of a New York law firm which devotes much of its time to the service of the underprivileged. • The Christ of Crisis Frank E. Gaebelein, Headmaster Emeritus of The Stony Brook School, is co-editor of Christianity Today. Also included are reports of discussions on such topics as p·a rental equivocation and student moral standards, school rules and student expulsion, sexual practice and student confusion.