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Education and the Study of Man

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2015

Grahame Clark
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Extract

Ducation as a subject for post-war planning is on everyone’s lips today. E Public interest has never been higher. Yet it may be doubted whether even now the full measure of its importance is realized. Next to winning the war, nothing is of greater moment than the battle for enlightenment, for if this is lost the ‘victory’ will be vain and we may all prepare for an ordeal more terrible than the present, because fought out among still larger aggregations of political and military power. The whole of history bears witness to the corruption of power, the struggles of the few for spoil of the many, the ignorance of the peoples and its lethal consequences to themselves. Today, thanks for the most part to the heroism of the common man, whether citizen of a bombed city, defender of Stalingrad, peasant of China, inhabitant of oppressed Europe or member of the forces of liberation, we stand on the threshold of what could be a new world: whether we cross that threshold or are elbowed back into the dark passage that leads to another holocaust, depends primarily on our attitude to education, on the steps taken during the next few years to bring to the common man everywhere a realization of his inheritance as a citizen of the world and an awareness of his power to mould his own destiny. What is needed above all is an overriding sense of human solidarity such as can come only from consciousness of common origins. Divided we fall victims to tribal leaders: united we may yet move forward to a life of elementary decency.

Type
Research Article
Information
Antiquity , Volume 17 , Issue 67 , September 1943 , pp. 113 - 121
Copyright
Copyright © Antiquity Publications Ltd 1943

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References

1 From his Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 29 December 1940, printed in The American Scholar, Spring, 1941. From lack of access to the original the passage has been quoted from Sir Richard Livingstone’s Education for a World Adrift (Cambridge, 1943), p. in.

2 op. cit. p. 1 (London, 1881).

3 S. Reinach, Cults, Myths and Religions, p. 157. (London, 1912).

4 Sir Richard Livingstone, Education for a World Adrift. (C.U.P. 1943).

5 See the present author’s Archaeology and Society, chap, VII (London, 1939). It is fair to add that this would have been stressed differently if written today.

6 During the evacuation of urban centres in the present war the country has realized with something of a shock the progress of deculturalization among the population of industrial cities. Thus a speaker in a recent House of Lords debate, a former professor of anatomy, is reported (Daily Telegraph, 6 May 1943) as remarking that ‘these people who came from the cities—women and mothers—seemed quite unable to do anything very much for themselves, and . . . were quite obviously without any effective social tradition’. The children were like untrained puppies and about 10 per cent, of the evacuees, he estimated, were ‘deplorably and absolutely cultural orphans’.