Cram Bewails Youths' Stand on Moral Issue

American college students are in such an "unhappy state" that "they cannot recognize a moral issue when they scone," according to an article in the current Atlantic Monthly by Paul P. Cram, instructor in History and dean of the History 1 staff.

The undergraduates' blindness to moral issues, their "demand for economic security above everything else," and their "indiscriminate assumption that their elders are sentimentalists or propagandists," is the product of a faulty educational system, Cram says in his analysis of "Undergraduates and the War."

"Educators must . . . find a way, not merely to make democratic idealism vital and efficient, but to make it more vital and more efficient than its ruthless and terrible rival," he states, noting that in the past ten years "the recipients of a unique educational bounty have done no better in a pinch than their less favored fellows."

Too Many Administrators

The trouble with American education is threefold, according to Cram. In the first place, "Leadership . . . during the last twenty years has passed into the hands of administrators rather than teachers."

In the second place, "the spiritual and ethical content has been exhausted from American education" with the abandonment of the Bible and the Classics as the core of the liberal curriculum. As a result, "our sons are cold to the agonies of the great tradition to which our culture belongs, indifferent to the fate of British democracy, though our national fate is inseparable from it, and are ready to call a policy which will leave our democracy to face totalitarian ruthlessness alone and isolated, a policy or 'realism'."

No More Bible and Classics

In place of the Bible and the Classics which Cram sees as "essential to the preservation of a democracy," we have two new elements: "the fashion for science, and the vogue for 'modern education.'"

"The current emphasis on the ruthless formulae of science," Cram suggests, may be partly responsible for "the materialistic indifference of our youth," and scientific determinism may have helped to "undermine the roots of democracy."

Modern education, he believes, tends to be superficial and undisciplined, and has failed to produce "a ruling aristocracy resting on education as well as blood and birth."