EDUCATION

Education is widely advertised as the force which will save the 20th Century from its own hatreds, confusions and follies. In liberal political theory, education is what gives the common man the ever increasing wisdom to govern his society. Again & again, during the M.I.T. convocation, speakers called on education to run major errands for humanity; philosophers wanted it to teach the proper attitude toward mass production, educators wanted it to do a better job of education.

Purchased Flowers. Significantly, M.I.T.'s panel on this subject was called "Specialization in 20th Century Education." So complex has 20th Century technology grown that it requires an increasing number of specially trained men to keep it going. So rapidly has the fund of scientific knowledge increased that it has become impossible for one man to comprehend all of it even in outline form. The result has been an increasing number of trained people who know their own field and little else--a type of what Ortega y Gasset calls the "learned ignoramus."

As Industrialist Charles Allen Thomas (Monsanto Chemical Co.) put it: "Education . . . has gone from training for living to training to make a living." The University of California's Professor Frederic Lilge carried the analysis further into American life: "The common ground on which we may meet for mutual pleasure and understanding is narrowed . . . Instead of being plowed deeply and continuously by the art of good talk, it is planted with the purchased flowers of jokes and stories from the Reader's Digest, with radio and video . . ."

Slaves fo Delusions. Specialization had its defenders. Harvard's Professor of Education Phillip Rulon argued that scientists, by & large, were well educated and civically conscious. Purdue's Engineering Dean Andrey Potter contended that engineering schools today respected the humanities. Purdue's average engineering student, he said, spends four-fifths of his time on his specialty, and one-fifth on the humanities, i.e., the rest of the universe. Even this slim ration is considerably cut by many schools.

The real danger, the panel implied, was not so much in frankly technical schools, which for good or ill are indispensable to 20th Century life, as in "liberal" colleges whose curricula have been invaded by petty specializations of all sorts. Said one speaker: "The modern university catalogue, with courses in everything from prenatal care to funeral directing, looks like a Sears, Roebuck catalogue." Sir Richard Livingstone, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, summed up: "To know one's age, and nothing else, is useless. We must be able to criticize and judge it ... Otherwise we risk being captives of our own day and slaves to its attendant delusions . . ."

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