The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 55, No. 1, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 14, 1967 Page: 1 of 8
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an all-student
newspaper
for
52 years
Hires
vol. 55, No. 1
houston, texas
thursday, sept. 14, 1967
mmm
esnmh
Hill Bluntm
Orientation
an editorial analysis
by Phil Garon
What would you thinl( if 1 sang out of tune,
Would you stand up and rvallf out on me?
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song
And I'll try not to sii\g out of /fey. . •
—Sgt. Pepper's Band
The six Rice colleges are once again facing the complex task of
integrating the individual into the group life of an academic community.
We say "complex" because this process must be accomplished while main-
taining the proper amount of respect for the "one-ness" of each person
in the sea of new faces which composes the second largest freshman class
in Rice's history.
The Rice freshman is a rare being indeed: one of the small minority
to survive a stringent process of screening and selection which chooses the
"cream of the crop" of all those aspiring to study in this particular grove
of academe. While the University selects each freshman as a potential
Scholar, and educates him in an appropriate manner, the colleges can ful-
fill the ideal function of humanizing the individual.
The goals of most of the orientation programs this year aire tied in
with this desire to preserve the sanctity (and sanity) of the individual
through the often trying years of his stay at Rice. A great deal of creativ-
ity is evident in the current orientation effort, but traditional questions
are still asked: What are the results that each college is trying to attain?
Will any of the varied approaches work to those ends? Is a week too
long for freshman orientation? Too short?
The questions this year have been left, as in the past, largely un-
answered. One of the difficulties in evaluating this freshman week as an
effort of the colleges is that the University has pre-empted a vast portion
of the time. One wonders why two entire mornings are consumed in dis-
cussions of classes, when the need could have been served by preparing
written reports on each course, and then allowing for informal discussions
between freshmen, upperclassmen iti the colleges, and faculty associates.
Placement examinations have again moved into the freshman week
picture in an overpowering way, evoking memories of the "good old days"
when the week was a mass of tests in trigonometry and literary composi-
tion. Two separate afternoon are given over to registration, precluding
other freshman activities in either of those periods.
Certainly many of these f University activities are necessary, but the
question is one of timing. Some of the colleges wish to try their own
experiments in education in this week, but their efforts are stifled because
See NECESSITY on p. 6
THE
FRESHMAN WEEK
EDITION
College head start
Part one - A proposal for orientation
emphasizing education as process
Bv EDDIE PHILLIPS, and
CHUCK YOUNG
Part two of this essay will appear
next week.
The traditional approach to Fresh-
man Orientation has led to planning
for the following kinds of activities:
the administrative details of checking
in, meeting with advisors, and register-
ing for courses; the social "mixer";
and an assortment of faculty lectures
and faculty-led discussion groups. In
this respect, this year's schedules dif-
fer little from the past. Freshmen
groups are shuffled from one station
to another-. A "full" week of events is
carefully planned
In our opinion, the freshman pro-
grams concerned with intellectual acti-
vities have been poorly developed. These
programs usually consist of short,
casual discussions of summer readings
and have not been developed from any
conception of how an individual learns,
or of the natui'e of education; no at-
tempt is made to apply the tools learn-
ed from the readings. In other words,
all of these programs have suffered
more or less from the same common
fault: an absence of direction in pur-
pose and program. To meet this defi-
ciency, we will set forth some assump-
tions upon which a more adequate
program, based on the ideal of an en-
vironment programmed for learning,
might be built. Later in the article, we
will give the details of such a program.
We begin with the basic idea that
the mind operates by association. An-
other way of saying this is that the
mind notices similarities and differences
in the objects that it perceives. For ex-
ample, sugar and salt considered visual-
ly are similar; considered as flavor-;,
they are quite different.
Related to this concept of association
is the notion of order. Considering the
example of the alphabet, it seems clear
that there are similarities between let-
ters of the alphabet. For example,
sounds we construct, we will not have
small explosion: B, V, and D; while
other have a sibilant sound when pro-
nounced: C and S. But not matter how-
many groups of similar a:.J dissimilar
sounds we construct, we will not have
produced the alphabet. That is, there
is something about the alphabet which
cannot be encompassed by the concept
of association. This is because the al-
phabet has an order: A, B, C, . . Z.
As a special case of the concept of
order, we would introduce the terms
"organization" and "structure," We will
use these words to discuss the aspects
of verbal order.
'We go on to define education, then,
as the progi-essive (re-)organization of
experience. To clarify this definition, we
return to our earlier example of the
similarities and differences of sugar
and salt. As an instance of this pro-
gressive reorganization, we could move
from primitive experiments on their
taste and feel, to inquiries about their
dissolution properties, to their molecu-
lar weights, and finally to their mole-
cular structures.
See RESTRUCTURING on p. 4
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Hancock, Darrell. The Rice Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 55, No. 1, Ed. 1 Thursday, September 14, 1967, newspaper, September 14, 1967; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth245005/m1/1/: accessed July 18, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.