Who Shall Teach the World?

Is U.S. education really the best in the world? Most Americans think it is. But not Dorothy Thompson. In a Manhattan broadcast last week she boomed:

"The dubious success of our own education seems to me to call for great humility. . . . That raises the question of the extent to which mass political behavior is influenced by education. We have to ask ourselves how Germans became Nazis in the first place. The millions of youth who pushed Hitler to power were not taught Hitlerism in their schools and universities. . . . The fact is that what students were taught in their schools did not conform to the reality which they saw in life. . . . Democracy failed to provide . . . a satisfactory social and economic existence. . . . Hitler merely canalized the almost universal discontent . . . It makes little difference what people learn in their schoolbooks . . . if their social and political life is depressed and insecure. . . ."

Thompson's salvo drew counterfire from N.Y.U.'s Professor Alonzo F. Myers. Said he:

"It would be as disastrous ... to permit Germany and Japan to go on teaching race hatred and world domination as it would be to permit them to go on building submarines and bombers. We must deny to them the right. . . . Some kind of international educational machinery is going to be necessary ... an International Education Office."

Today an I.E.O. is the aim of two major U.S. educators' groups. The U.S. Committee on Educational Reconstruction wants "to make sure that no country will again use education for poisoning." The Liaison Committee for International Education is trying to stimulate U.S. public interest in postwar educational problems. On record favoring an I.E.O. are spokesmen of China and of the exiled Governments of Poland, Czecho-Slovakia, Jugoslavia, Greece.

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