Times & Texts

With Europe's face remade in 1938, U. S. textbook maps today are out of date. Pupils learn geography from newspapers, magazines, such reviews as American Observer and Scholastic, which 600,000 youngsters read each week. They cluster for their daily lessons around school bulletin boards, across which march a procession of new maps and dispatches from war fronts.

As 26,000,000 children returned last week to U. S. public schools to begin a new year, they found democracy attempting to bring its self-defense propaganda as well as maps up to date. U. S. teachers, fresh from year-end conventions whose theme was democracy's defense, read in the U. S. Office of Education's publication, School Life, a reminder that State laws require them to teach their pupils devotion to the ideals and principles of democracy.

State laws, however, are contradictory and confused, no help but a hindrance to teachers. Some stress teachings scarcely to be distinguished from those of foreign dictatorships: obedience to authority, a narrow, nationalistic patriotism.

From textbook publishers' presses today pours a flood of books designed to teach democracy. Many of these books are less benign toward modern dictatorships than pre-War texts were toward the old European monarchies. Some denounce dictators. But most contemporary history books balance their moral indignation, state the dictatorships' case and let pupils judge for themselves. Sample excerpts:

From a junior-high-school American history: ". . . The Japanese army . . . by 1937 was in full control and the Japanese people were ruled by what was really a military dictatorship. . . . At Shanghai the Chinese held back the invader for months in a magnificent stand. Japanese air fleets dropped bombs on Chinese cities and killed thousands of unarmed people. The League of Nations and the United States protested against such terrorism."

From a college European history: "Among them Great Britain, France, Russia and the United States own or control something like three-fourths of the earth's surface. . . . They constitute the real world powers and are the Haves. . . . Japan, Italy and Germany . . . although territorially no match for the four giants . . . are inhabited by spirited peoples by no means willing to accept their present inferiority as if it had been ordered for all time by a divine decree."

From a high-school civics book: "Dictatorship . . . makes much of national unity. . . . Convicts doing the lockstep in a prison yard are a perfect example of unity, but we do not envy them. . . . Hitler and Mussolini . . . talk much of the virtues which fascism fosters. . . . But fascism has no monopoly of courage and sacrifice. . . ."'

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