Abstract
DR. HARLOW SHAPLEY, speaking on behalf of the U.S. Office of War Information, recently broadcast an address in the United States with reference to an International Office for Education. He pointed out that both education and lack of education play a part in our present world-wide troubles. The high technical training in the armed forces, and also in the war factories that back the armies and navies, represents a type of education that is indispensable in our effort to bring back peace and social sanity to the world. But it is a lack of education—a deficiency in elementary social education, or a perversion of it, that has brought the madness of totalitarian war upon us. In too many parts of the world the fundamental education has not been planned so as to teach us how to live and let others live intelligently in the kind of world that modern technical civilization has given us. In the social evolution that is necessary for a good and progressive world society, we must have a basic education so widespread, and so democratic in spirit, that demagogues cannot easily lead us into inhuman and selfish and false creeds. We must have, if possible, in all grades of our educational systems, the desire and freedom to question statements, to challenge dogmas. We must question our teachers, and not be blindly led by them. We should encourage internationalism in our leaders. We must have, especially in our elementary schools, a universal recognition that there are international allegiances as well as national responsibilities, that we are a part of a world-wide human society.
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An International Office for Education. Nature 154, 761–762 (1944). https://doi.org/10.1038/154761c0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/154761c0