Marihuana : a signal of misunderstanding first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse.

  • United States. Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse
Date:
[1972?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Marihuana : a signal of misunderstanding first report of the National Commission on Marihuana and Drug Abuse. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    notion of failure has lost its meaning. As one of the Seminar partici- pants observed : I think one of the problems is that there is no longer a penalty for failure. We—the educators—have had to lower standards in order to accommodate these people who need no longer fear failure. Of course this has been a cyclical thing, a wheel within a wheel. [If] there is no longer a penalty for failure, then there is no longer the need to acquire. The changing function of education has been felt in both the sec- ondary schools and in our institutions of higher learning. Numerous high school graduates cannot read. Colleges and junior colleges have sprung up overnight to accommodate the population, but many provide classrooms with little specific purpose. Only slowly is the educational system beginning to come to grips with its role in a changed society. At the university level, many educators have been appalled at sacri- fices which have ensued from the custodial feature; rote learning, they contend, has supplanted citizen and character education. Uncertainty about the role of the educational system has not escaped the students, particularly at the college level. Many of our youth, pressed into longer attendance, question its need or desira- bility. The demand for “relevance” is but another reflection of the search for meaning, for an understandable role in society. Drug use has perhaps provided an outlet for some members of this restless gen- eration, uncertain of its place. The Limits of Rationality The social response to the individual’s search for meaning has fostered an ambivalence, an unwillingness to act, a paralysis. In large measure, according to one Seminar member, this default of authority reveals the intensity of the search: In the same way we are getting universities that can’t teach, families that can’t socialize and police forces that can’t catch criminals. In every case, the same issue is involved : the subject of authority ques- tions the legitimacy of authority and the exerciser of it is unable to find—very often doesn’t even try to find—a defense, because he feels in himself a sympathy, as do so many parents, with the challenge. To a significant extent, society is waiting, hoping that the impulse for change will settle around certain fundamental attributes of the American ethic. At the present time, however, no consensus about the nature of these fundamentals exists. We are all looking for values that have deep roots, as we attempt to sort out the durable from the ephemeral. All of the participants at our Central Influences Seminar agreed