Intolerable Conditions Research Articles

Genet's New Play: The Screens

In Jean Genet's The Screens the revolt of the Algerian Arabs against their French colonizers is not characterized by the emancipation of human beings. Although the colonizers are described as oppressors inflated with their own power, the misery and the intolerable condition of the oppressed are not denounced in order to promote the liberation of the colonized people. On the contrary, these misfortunes are exalted so that the humiliated individual has the opportunity to make his misery the occasion for an inner experience based on the absolute contrast and conflict between his values and those of the Other—an unceasing contestation through which Saïd achieves a sovereignty which no action founded on the hope of a more just world could yield. For hope can take root only in this world, and the hope of claiming one's rights is lost in the desire to become the Other. The subjective, ascetic, and tragic experience of Saïd has indeed no political value.

The History of Adult Education in the United States

James Truslow Adams in his recently published study2 of adult education in the United States holds that, coincident with the landings of the white man on the North American coast at Jamestown in 1607 and at Plymouth in 1620, his adult education began. If learning by living and through experience constitutes adult education-and there is ample evidence to support the belief-then indeed is Dr. Adams' thesis correct, for it was a hard and bitter school of experience indeed that opened in that far off day for the new and untried settlers in a bleak and unknown wilderness. But if American adult education started at that moment for the white man, it had started far earlier in this country for the red Indian, who of course had been faced with the same perils' and hardships encountered in the same hard school of experience for no one can say how many hundreds of years previously. And for another group of American citizens, brought far later to the American shores under conditions of cruelty and hardship, the bitter school of experience likewise opened its doors but this time under the intolerable conditions attending human slavery. The African Negro, become an American slave, had to learn through experience and at once

Industrial Surgery: its Relation to Radiology

Industrial relations between employer and employee had reached a stage in the United States about fifteen years ago which rendered cordial co-operation almost impossible. Intolerable conditions were plainly manifest under the old system of common law. With the unprecedented intensive industrial development in this country there naturally arose associated troublesome problems linked with obstacles which seemed insurmountable. There has been an ever-increasing influx in the past thirty years from the country to the city and this in no small measure has added to the difficulty of solving these problems. Prior to the adoption of similar measures in the United States, we find that legislation was enacted in Europe to obviate the evils arising out of and during the course of employment. England and Germany long ago adopted measures in the form of the Work-ingmen's Compensation Acts, to relieve the hardship and suffering correlated with the old system. It was only natural, then, that when a similar situation pre...

The Problems of City Government from the Administrative Point of View

Much has been written during recent years about the defects of American municipal government. And all sorts of remedies have been proposed, and many of them put to the test of experience. Discussion and agitation, followed by legislation and the election of better officials, have wrought great improvement in many communities; and even the most recent disclosures of intolerable conditions have been signs of an awakened public opinion and the direct cause of uprooting some evils. But no one has suggested that we have as yet reached a state of perfection in municipal government, or that we are in any immediate danger of attaining such a state.