The Policy of Prolonging the Life of Textbooks*

Abstract

I wonder if all our modern emphasis on individualizing education-in professional training, for instance-might not also be well applied to training for citizenship, Dr. James Bryant Conant, President of Harvard University, said. He pointed out that students of various backgrounds and interests, even students in various institutions, be aided toward making a diversity of contributions, according to their individual abilities, toward the good of the social whole. We should know the machinery of government, Dr. Conant said, adding that he did not think such understanding difficult at the adult level. But he suggested that we may have pushed the concept of the town meeting too far, that we expect men and women to make rational decisions in specialized matters, whereas the emphasis should be on training each citizen to be a wise, well-balanced, emotionally stable person. There may be too much emphasis on contemporary problems, too, Dr. Conant said; it be well to look back more into the cultural history of the past, especially of this country, so that one get a balanced picture of what is happening through knowing what has happened. Thus a critical and intelligent study of great literature be as important as study in fields more generally recognized as pertaining to social science, Dr. Conant said. Such study of literature would tend to show the real content of the emotional life of the time and of the forces that swung it. Dr. Conant quoted John Selden, who, talking three hundred years ago of the precious portions of antiquity that throw light on the law, literature, and good morals of the present, said that study of the past give maturity of vision and experience, might so accumulate years to use as if we had lived even from the beginning of time.-From Cincinnati Enquirer, February 23, 1938.