Armstrong – Table of Contents

Association Annual Banquet and Reunion (5) held at the Alliance Women’s Club where
he was to give the evening’s main address. The banquet menu included fried chicken,
creamed new potatoes, asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, hot rolls, jam, pineapple
mango salad, strawberry pie and ice cream, and coffee. Fortified by this substantial meal,
Armstrong launched into his talk entitled “Education and Research” (5). Despite the
suggestion that he describe his adventures investigating psittacosis and its personal
peripheral aspects, he said he preferred to begin his talk about more current customs and
general social trends in the United States of the 1930s. He started by particularly
deploring students’ early search for specialization in education. This trend, he felt,
resulted from the students’ desire to achieve vocational security in the face of the rapid
increase in the sum total of knowledge that was inhumanly impossible to assimilate. He
was an advocate of a broad, general, academic curriculum of the liberal arts and sciences.
“Certainly, the student who considers his college courses as so many hurdles to overcome
before he reaches the main contest will profit little from them. On the other hand, if the
student’s interest can be so aroused that he desires to know all there is to know about any
particular subject and its related fields (intellectual curiosity), the beautiful interrelation
of natural facts will lead him to a truly liberal education.”
Armstrong further said that fine buildings, elaborate equipment and facilities or
even books did not or might not ignite the spark of interest. Rather, it was the friction and
interaction between interested and dedicated teachers and receptive students that provided
the impetus for ignition of the spark. In this regard, he referred to memorable members of
the Mount Union College science faculty with whom he shared common interests, and
whose teaching styles he found stimulating. He said that these teachers by their quiet