Information Please

The lanky American asked the class of British schoolboys: "Suppose you were sitting on the bank of the Mississippi River looking east. How far away would the Atlantic Ocean be?" Blank looks. Many of them had never heard of the Mississippi River. Said a boy who had: "100 miles." Another: "500 miles."

Such is the illiteracy in British schools regarding the U.S. Witness to this Anglo-duncism was Yankee Chester Williams, an assistant to U.S. Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker, who last week reported on his official ten-week tour of British schools. He brought news that Britain had decided to step up its imports of information about the U.S., and that Britain's National Exchange Library had raised $100,000 to buy U.S. history and fiction books for muddled British pupils.

Last winter's first British experiment in teaching U.S. history didn't get very far. Most secondary schoolchildren, who knew far more about ancient Greece than about the U.S., believed "the best people withdrew from the colony and left the troublemakers to fight it out among themselves." And via Hollywood, they believed in gangster-ruled cities and an all-cowboy West.

British historians, who have lately begun to write more books about the U.S., still grate on U.S. ears. Typical excerpt (from a discussion of the Declaration of Independence by Historian C. F. Strong in The Story of the American People): "Some of these postulates, far from being self-evident, are not even truths, and it is now generally admitted by American historians that the philosophy of the Declaration is dubious, and most of the grievances hardly fundamental."

But Britons here & there showed signs of progress. In a secondary school in the working-class district of Manchester the children had organized a "Pen Pals Club" to correspond with U.S. moppets in such namesake towns as Manchester, Tex., Manchester, Mich. They steamed labels from cans of Lend-Lease goods, wrote history themes on the towns and States whence they originated.

The U.S. Government now began an ambitious educational program. Returning to Washington last week, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish left behind in London a new Office of War Information branch, headed by onetime Banker James Paul Warburg. It has four functions: 1) supplying U.S. information to Britons, a job to be directed by able, young New York Timesman James B. Reston who spent four years in England covering British affairs; 2) conducting political (i.e., propaganda) warfare in enemy countries; 3) rebroadcasting U.S. short-wave programs from Britain; 4) improving relations between U.S. soldiers and Britons.

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