How to Live with the Bomb

It is the conviction of the University of Chicago's Chancellor Robert Maynard Hutchins that present-day man can find the cure for what ails him in the Great Books ("the minutes of the previous meeting"). Last week his theory drew a lively attack from one of education's new boy wonders, Harold A. Taylor,/-/- who at 33 is president of New York's progressive Sarah Lawrence College. President Taylor accused Hutchins (who at 48 is a kind of boy wonder emeritus) of living in the sterile past. Wrote Taylor in a column-long letter-to-the-editor in the New York Times:

". . . The difficulty of living with the atom bomb is not that few people have read Aristotle, but that so few people understand or care about the structure of contemporary society. The main task is to set people thinking about social questions, and to have them take seriously their own obligations. ... It is this practical problem . . . which must engage the attention of those who plan to save civilization by education, rather than the discussion of moral ideals by people who need only great books, a room and some company, in order to save us all.

"As one who has become involved with most of the books on Mr. Hutchins' Book-of-the-2,000-Years-Club, I would say that the kind of discussion [in the Great Books groups] is much different from the impression given. In a discussion whose single dominant character is that no one knows very much about the book under consideration, the absence of an informed person usually means that . . . intellectual humility is also absent. What usually happens is that people say, in a very solemn voice, things they would not dream of saying anywhere else. . . ."

Taylor conceded that "in the work of the past [there are] clues for dealing with the present" but argued that "an exclusive concern [with] the classical curriculum has failed in the past and will fail today. ... It may be that education is not a strong enough social tool to maintain the survival of civilization. However, one can look for more in it than Mr. Hutchins' pious hope that if we go down, we will go down talking."

/-/- Not to be confused with the University of Louisville's President John Taylor.

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