Word: phenix
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Desire v. Worth. By training up children in "a democracy of desire." he says in a provocative new book titled Education and the Common Good (Harper; $4), the schools heighten "a gnawing sense of meaninglessness" in U.S. life. Does Phenix then mean that secular schools should actually teach "religious" values...
...Phenix means just that, and it is his book's aim to specify how such values can enter U.S. schools through the front door instead of being smuggled through the back. As he sees it, training for "a democracy of desire" can be changed to training for "a democracy of worth." By emphasizing giving, not getting, the entire curriculum can be suffused with self-transcending "devotion to the good, the right, the true, the excellent...
...that is a resounding ideal, Denver-born Author Phenix backs it up with rich personal experience. A Quaker turned Presbyterian, he majored in mathematical physics at Princeton ('34), became a life insurance actuary, a student at Union Theological Seminary, an Army meteorologist, an Army chaplain and a Carleton College professor of religion. He earned his doctorate at Columbia University with a thesis on theology and physics. He is married and the father of sons 15 and 16 years old. Last year he quit his deanship at Carleton because "I don't think college administrations are fertile sources...
Commitment to Truth. Phenix's moral curriculum goes far beyond mere mastery of traditional subjects. His aim is the moral application of knowledge. In short, his students would be taught to uphold "worth" in every area of life...
...intelligence is "commitment to truth." Hence schools should emphasize scientific methods of inquiry. For their part, scientists and scholars have "an obligation to render their knowledge in the most intelligible possible form; they should not glory in obscurity." Equally accountable are newspapers, magazines, radio and TV, which Phenix calls "the real public schools." It is their duty not to give the public what it wants, but to improve critical standards and disseminate the real facts of life...