Ulich Declares That Unemployed Students Are "Sometimes Bearers of Revolutionary Attitudes"

Unemployed students who have been given theoretical rather than vocational training are often radical agitators according to Doctor Robert Ulich, German educator and visiting lecturer on Comparative Education, in the current number of the Harvard Teachers Record.

"It is commonplace now, after a series of hard experiences, to speak of the dangers of an academic proletariat with all its cruel consequences not only for the persons directly concerned but also for the nation as a whole," he writes. "Moreover, it is hardly worth while to affirm that the members of such a proletariat--disappointed, unemployed, and equipped with a relatively high standard of mental training and skill--very often become the bearers of a radical revolutionary attitude.

"On the one side," he says, 'the growing fermentation of secondary and higher schools effected a growing expansion of these school types, on the other hand this expansion stimulated parents more and more to give their children a more theoretical schooling, and both factors helped to produce a type of young man who, in consequence of his education, was spoiled for the more practical aspects of life, and who, on the other hand, was unable to find a position to which he felt entitled.

"It is a wrong conception of political freedom which is often identified with democracy to think that every individual has the right to any kind of schooling. Schools are institutions not only of and for individuals but of and for greater groups of people, of the community and of the state. And even private schools in many respects are dependent upon, and therefore also bound to the cooperation of many political and cultural factors within the frame of the whole nation."