The importance of education as a safeguard of “freedom, tolerance, human growth,” is stressed in a special issue of Survey Graphic devoted to the challenge of the world crisis to education.
The problem of inadequate aims and inept teaching and the “tragic failure inherent in the fact of idle youth, four out of ten not in school, jobless, ready tinder for demagogues,” is quite as serious as the problem of economic or racial discrimination in education, the magazine asserts.
“By what failure in the educational process are young people turned out, so insecure and so undiscriminating that they flock to rabble rousers?” an introductory editorial asks. “What educational gaps let in hate and prejudice? What quickens curiosity? Strengthens integrity? Distinguishes truth from propaganda? Encourages neighborliness and good will? Turns knowledge and training into the stuff of action?
“Here are concerns more enduring than military communiques and diplomatic moves. The strengths and weaknesses of the democratic way of life lie within our own borders. Mightier than armies with banners, the quiet, unromantic forces of education are the safeguards of freedom, tolerance, human growth.”
The conclusion reached by a number of contributors to the issue is that: “It is everybody’s business and the Republic’s concern that the future population of our cities is being drawn from the educationally underprivileged sections of the country.” For self-protection, if for no humanitarian reason, an expanding program of federal aid to education is predicted as inevitable. Contributors include Ordway Tead, president of the New York City Board of Higher Education; Harold W. Doods, president of President of Princeton University; Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University; John Studebaker, United States Commissioner of Education, and Eunice Fuller Barnard, educational director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
