Below is the OCR text representation for this newspapers page.

14 THE PANTHER Culture A Loose Garment Culture is one of those suitcase words into which anything can be stuffed. So also it is an umbrella word under which many disorders are put. Many people use the word, yet few agree upon its meaning. In deed, is has become one of the “loose garments” of education; therefore when used, its meaning should be clarified. Many college and university cata logs allude to culture as one of the ultimate aims of the institution. Once a student was suspended from school because he was told that he lacked “culture,” while on the other hand his instructors told him that everybody had culture. What is this culture to which reference was made in both instances? Many people cannot an swer this, yet those who use the term far outnumber those who understand its meaning. Such instances seem to indicate the need for some consensus definition in the use of the word. One writer feels the need for such understanding and indicates that the crux of the problem concerning col lege goals and many practices per haps lies in differing concepts of culture. It would be too much to expect this article to suggest a way out of the confusion which results because of these varying conceptions of culture. Some consensus of definition, how ever, may he hoped for to reduce the wide diversity of conception. An understanding of the word “culture” necessitates some knowl edge of what the term was first con ceived to mean and its changing con ceptions from earliest use to present. As far as this writer can establish, the word “culture” was first used in a reverential sense and as early as 1483 by William Caxton of England in The Golden Legend. The action or practice of cultivating the soil — tillage — which comes from the Latin verb cohere appears to be another early conception. Bacon’s Sylva, writ ten in 1626, makes a reference to cul ture in this use. The famous Essay on Man by Pope, written and pub lished between 1732 and 1734, em ploys the word in a similar use. Still another conception involved the artificial development of micro scopic organisms, especially bacte ria in specially prepared media and the products thereof. In translating Thucydides’ history of the Grecian War, Hobbes in 1843 translated culture to mean the train ing of the human body. In an educational sense “culture” is generally thought to have come into use with Matthew Arnold, but this is not true. It is true that the word was not popular in an educational sense before the 19th century and that Arnold did popularize it. but long before Arnold, in discussing the matter, form, and power of a commonwealth — ecclesiastical and civil — Thomas Hobbes referred to the education of children as a culti vation of their minds. Just when culture was first used to refer to the leisure class, if it ever did specifically, has not been deter mined by the writer unless it is as sumed that those who had the time and money for the cultivation of their minds were of the leisure class. Ar nold makes some reference to this in his “Sweetness and Light” from which the essence of his theory on culture comes. Thus, culture came to refer to the training, development and refinement of the mind as we think of it today. The anthropological conception of culture came into use after Arnold. Edward A. Freeman, in The History oj the Norman Conquest, published in 1879, alludes to culture as we think of it anthropologically. Later use of the word in an anthropological sense might have come from Freeman. There is a very close relationship between the anthropological concep tion of culture and the conceptions which preceded it in that they all in volve the idea of growth. When one realizes that the extent of personal cultivation of the mind is based upon or depends directly upon the oppor tunities available for development — what the anthropologists call the cul ture base — this relationship is more sharply defined. For example, Bee thoven could not have composed his Ninth Symphony except in a culture which contained the pianoforte on which to compose. In other words, everything man has created, both material and non-material, his way of life, the anthropologists call culture. What is clear from all of this is that confusion of the term still exists. One writer feels that the work of the anthropologists ( who have come after Arnold) have pointed the way out of the jumble into which Arnold tossed us. He indicates that the achieve ments of the anthropologists are best clarified in German rather than in English. The Germans make a dis tinction between two types of culture: personal culture about which Arnold chiefly wrote, and group culture about which the anthropologists write. Per sonal culture, they call “Bildung.” Group or social culture, they call “Kultur.” Poetic interest or in terest in music would be personal development. All of society’s insti tutions — economic and political, educational and religious — make group culture (Kultur! and deter mine the style of life of a group. Clearly this seems the best way to clarify the jumble as well as serve