measure and master the world, rather than to understand it ** Viewed scientifically, it appears as something to be accepted, something to be manipu-lated and mastered, something to adjust ourselves to with the least possible stress. So long as we can make efficient use of things, we feel no irresistible need to understand them. No doubt it is for this reason chiefly that the modern mind can be so wonderfully at ease in a mysterious universe.” At ease, indeed. Anybody who feels at ease in the world today is a fool. And anybody who would say now that he was content to master and manipulate the environment without bothering to understand how it worked or what to do with it would show first that he did not know what science was, for science is organized understanding, and second that he had no grasp of the kind of problems we now confront. The great overwhelming problems of our country are how to make democracy a reality, how to survive in the nuclear age, and what to do with ourselves if we do survive. None of these problems is technological though technology has helped to create all of them, and none of them will yield to the kind of measurement, manipulation, or mastery that Professor Becker had in mind. We may, in fact, reverse his statement of 1931 and come nearer the truth -of 1959. Then it would go like this: no doubt it is because we have felt no irresistible need to understand the world that the modern mind can be so wonderfully ill at ease in a mysterious universe. The next question is, How are we going to learn? History will have trouble with American education in the 20th century. It will see a people who say they are dedicated to education and who are the richest in the world indifferent to education and unwilling to pay for it. It will see an educational system that delivers less education per dollar than any I can think of saying that all it needs is more money. The people and the educators are united only in this: They both want education without pain, either intellectual or financial. History will find it hard to explain how a nation that is one, a nation in which the -political subdivisions have no relation to social or economic life and little to -political life, can entrust its future to these subdivisions by relegating education to them. History will smile sardonically at the spectacle of this great country getting interested slightly and temporarily, in education only because of the technical achievements of Russia, and then being able to act as a nation only by assimilating education to the cold war and calling an education bill a defense act. We might as well make up our minds to it. If our hopes of democracy are to be realized, every citizen of this country is going to have to be educated to the limit of his capacity. And I don't mean trained, amused, exercised, accommodated, or adjusted. I mean that his intellectual power must be developed. A good way to start finding the money that is needed for education. would be to kick out of it the subjects, the activities, and the people that make no contribution to the development of intellectual power. Such an operation would produce vast sums. I suggest that two things might be done with this money and with any more that may be needed: First, we should double teachers' salaries, not because all the teachers we have deserve twice as much as they are getting, but because we want to attract the ablest people into the profession; and second, we should establish a national system of scholarships that makes it possible for every citizen of this country to be educated to the limit of his mental capacity, regardless of the financial capacity of his parents. If life is learning, and I think it is, and if our object is to become a community learning together, education ought to continue throughout life. Here is the great educational opportunity and obligation of the next generation. The education of adults is not only indispensable to the continuation, expansion, and improvement of the dialogue, but it is also an answer to the question of what we are going to do with ourselves if we survive. As automation advances, as new sources of energy are applied in industry, as the hours of labor decline, we have the chance to become truly human by using our new and disturbing leisure to develop our highest human powers to the utmost. Here we can build on the experience of such organizations as the Great Books Foundation, which has succored tens of thousands of refugees from television. This brings me to the media of mass communications. If our hopes of democracy are to be realized, the media must supply full and accurate information on which the people can base their judgment on public affairs, and they must offer a forum for the discussion of those affairs. I doubt if there are six cities of any size in the United States in which the newspapers come anywhere near meeting these requirements. As for radio and television, with a few distinguished exceptions now and then, they make no attempt to meet them. The so-called extended news coverage supplied by radio and television during the recent newspaper strike in New York was a bad joke. A dozen years ago the Commission on the Freedom of the Press recommended the establishment of a continuing independent agency, privately financed, to appraise and report periodically on the performance of the media. Everything that has happened since, and especially the use of the most marvelous electronic methods of communication for the communication of the most insignificant material, makes the adoption of this recommendation more urgent every day. If we were well educated and well informed, could we make ourselves felt in the realm of political action? In the Republic as I have described it every act of assent on the part of the governed is a product of learning. Could we learn by doing in politics? Or would the archaic aspects of our governmental structure and the vast bureaucratic machine that goes creaking on, following the right procedure instead of seeking the right result, prevent us from using our newly won education and information as active, deciding, responsible citizens? Today the dialogue is impeded by obsolescent practices and institutions from the long ballot to the presidential primary, from the electoral college to the organization of cities, counties, and States. In too-frequent elections unknown persons by the hundreds running for insignificant offices, and numerous improper questions, like the dozens submitted at every California election, are presented to the electorate. This is not democracy, but a perversion of it. The political anatomy is full of vermiform appendixes, many of them, like Arkansas, inflamed. Some of these obsolescent practices stop the dialogue in its tracks, like the failure of the FCC and Congress to develop any concept of the public interest, convenience, and necessity. Some of them distort the dialogue by throwing false weights into it, as the electoral college gives a false weight to the large States and the laws on campaign expenditures give money an overwhelmingly false weight in elections. One thing is certain, and that is that if our hopes of democracy are to be realized, the next generation is in for a job of institutional remodeling the like of which has not been seen since the Founding Fathers. Well, suppose we got this remodeling done. Could we then turn ourselves into active, responsible, participating citizens? Wouldn't the bureaucracy, though better, and administering better laws, still have us by the throat? The answer depends partly on our capacity for political invention, which in 1787 was quite large, and partly on what participation means. If we can be equipped for the dialogue and then invent the means by which the bureaucracy can hear it and be made responsive to it, we shall have come a long way from where we are now in relation, for example, to the State Department and the Atomic Energy Commission. Then political participation would mean not only what it too often means exclusively now, the ballot, but also participation in the dialogue about the ends and means of the political society. We would be a community learning together, and the bureaucracy would be learning, too. The notion that the sole concern of a free society is the limitation of governmental authority and that that government is best which governs least is certainly archaic. Our object today should not be to weaken government in competition with other centers of power, but rather to strengthen it as the agency charged with the responsibility for the common good. That government is best which governs best. Mr. Hoover could see no constitutional way of coping with depression, as Buchanan before him could see no constitutional way of coping with secession. We started out to show in 1932 that our institutions were sufficiently flexible to care for the welfare of all the people. The demonstration was never made. We have got instead the pressure group state, which cares for the welfare of those who are well enough organized to put on the pressure. The genealogy of this development is strange. When I was a boy, we knew what stood between us and freedom, justice, and equality: it was special privilege. Get rid of special privilege, we said, and the common good will be achieved. In our time pacification has been attained not by getting rid of special privilege but by extending it, by extending it to those well enough organized to threaten the special privileges under attack. Is the tariff hurting the farmers? Retain the tariff and subsidize the farmers. Are administered prices hurting labor? Let's have administered wages, too. Is industry demoralized by expense accounts and tax dodges? Let's have featherbedding in labor, too. Is something done by some group antisocial? Let's all of us-all of us who can put on the pressure be antisocial, too. And if a Federal agency is established to regulate us, never fear; we have the pressure that will shortly make the agency the servant and mouthpiece of the interests it was intended to control. And as we laughingly count our gains at the expense of the public, we can reverently repeat the solemn incantation that helped to make them possible: that government is best which governs least. The Constitution must protect the citizen against the government. The government must protect him against society and the rapacity of organizations in it by seeing to it that these organizations pursue purposes and programs consonant with the common good. The stresses and strains in our society are obscured for us partly by our preoccupation with Russia, which plays a curious double role as the devil in our world and as the standard by which we measure our progress. If we weren't getting ahead of Russia, or falling behind her, how would we tell where we were? Our real problems are also concealed from us by our current remarkable prosperity, which results in part from the production of arms that we do not expect to use, and in part from our new way of getting rich, which is to buy things from one another that we do not want at prices we cannot pay on terms we cannot meet because of advertising we do not believe. But beneath these superficial manifestations, beneath our fantasies of fear on the one hand and wealth on the other, are moving those great, fundamental, historic forces which will put our institutions and our democratic faith to the test. This is the basic fact of our life as a people. I have never subscribed to the proposition once debated in the Oxford Union, that in the opinion of this house Columbus went too far. Nor can I bring myself to refer to man as he is now referred to in military technology, as a "biomechanical link." If Columbus had not gone so far, man might never have had the chance to become anything more than a biomechanical link. America is still the hope of mankind. It is still our responsibility, now more than ever, to see to it that government of the people, by the people, and for the people does not perish from the earth. (Whereupon, at 11:30 a.m. the committee was recessed subject to call.) SCHOOL SUPPORT ACT OF 1959 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 1959 HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE ON GENERAL EDUCATION OF THE COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION AND LABOR, Washington, D.C. The subcommittee met at 10 a.m., pursuant to recess, in room 430, House Office Building, Hon. Cleveland M. Bailey, chairman of the subcommittee, presiding. Present: Representatives Bailey and Brademas. Also present: Robert E. McCord, clerk of the subcommittee. Mr. BAILEY. The subcommittee will be in order. The Chair would like to recognize a member of the staff to offer material for inclusion in the printed hearings at this time. Mr. McCord. Mr. McCORD. Mr. Chairman, we have a letter and a resolution from the Minneapolis Federation of Teachers, No. 59, and a letter from, the Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, which have been submitted to be included in the record. Mr. BAILEY. Without objection, they will be accepted for inclusion in the record at this point. (The material referred to follows:) Hon. CLEVELAND BAILEY, MASSACHUSETTS FEDERATION OF TEACHERS, Chairman, Subcommittee on Education, House Committee on Labor and Education, Washington, D.C. DEAR REPRESENTATIVE BAILEY: The Massachusetts Federation of Teachers, urges favorable action by the Subcommittee on Education on H.R. 22, the Murray-Metcalf bill. Massachusetts stands 44th among the States in terms of the amount of State aid provided to support education. The State subsidy at present averages $40 per pupil out of an average overall State cost per pupil of $250. Efforts this year by school, community, and labor groups to increase aid to education by one-third in the legislature stand little chance of success in view of the serious and complex financial crisis in the State. The immediate relief offered by H.R. 22 to aid school construction and teacher salaries is the most sound and workable proposal before the Congress. Inasmuch as Federal aid for school-construction will defeat its own purposes if competent teachers are not retained and attracted we strongly urge the acceptance of both features of H.R. 22. Sincerely yours, Miss BELLE LINSKY, President. 405 |