There are those who still hold that the present world war is either phoney or the work of evil men. But even these can scarcely deny that a war of sorts is going on over much of the earth. Interpretations of the meaning of this war are many, as the present volume testifies. But few will deny that it presents a deadly struggle between two rival systems: on the one hand is old system of democratic drift holding the forlorn hope that the status quo can be restored, for our time, at least; on the other hand, a new system, emergent since the sixteenth century, is employing all the forces and machineries of the technological revolution, with complete ruthlessness, with the professed purpose of bringing about a rationalized world-order, whatever that may mean. Nor is this war confined to lands outside the Western Hemisphere. No matter what the war is about, its repercussions are felt all over the Americas. Because of it, there is confusion of counsels in the United States, as this present volume again offers much evidence: there is little agreement among these writers on any one theme. We are fighting this war in the newspapers; on the radio; on a thousand platforms; on the street corners. So whether the war is noble or wholly evil, or a little of both, we of America are involved in it, if for no other reason than that we live on the Earth, and not on Mars. Hence, we do well to try to find out what it is doing to us, and what we can do about it. We are concerned, in this chapter, with the meanings of this world crisis for organized education. Lack of space prevents adequate discussion of this question. We must plunge into it, fullstream, with this rather dogmatic statement: in the light of bursting bombs, education appears to be a sort of superficial veneer of shiny mahogany which covers structural materials that are rent with fissures, twisted in fierce fires, and so much decayed through long neglect that it seems nothing less than a complete overhauling can make anything dependable out of them. This is a hard saying, but the facts will support it. The modern world is the product of an historical culture that has made humanity a caricature of itself. The Greeks developed humanism. That humanism was a fractional thing: it ignored the presence of slaves; it made no real place for women, as human beings; it was contemptuous of all barbarian aliens, who had not the good sense to be born Greeks. In sum, it was a narrow, provincial, prejudiced fragment of humanity that developed Greek humanism. The product was provincial, like its creators. This was true, even in the earlier village days of Athens. In the later, metropolitan city, in the days of political and social disintegration, that earlier humanism became, at the