TWO IS NOT A CROWD

Within the training programs, however, there is as yet no clear-cut definition of how much liberal education is consistent with the urgent need for technically trained men. Cultural values which ordinated to the immediate job of destroying the even five months ago were important are now sub-enemy. This is the inevitable loss of war. But in the hasty conversion of the colleges into arsenals of technocracy, definite opportunities which exist to maintain the liberal tradition throughout the war must not be wasted in the training programs. Secretary of War Stimson has said that the Army training program will temporarily destory liberal education. It need not be so.

If the need for speed dictates that the Army training program must be the narrow technical affair that present portents indicate, then the humanities must be curtailed. But a total blackout now of liberal education may cause it to suffer in the long run. The carefully developed faculties of many universities might irrevocably be decimated by such a suspension of the liberal arts for the remaining years of the war. Whatever there is in the way of liberal education will serve as the nucleus of post-war studies in the liberal arts. And although Army officials have expressed the opinion that general education is of little or no value in the training of officers, the Navy has gone to the colleges almost exclusively for its commissioned personnel. The interest of the Army itself through its ROTC and ERC programs, and the preponderance of college men in its Officer Candidate Schools are evidences that it too sees the officer as something more than a military machine turned out in 90 days at OCS. Yet in the rush to satisfy the officer and technician needs of an 8,000,000-man army, the War Department has forgotten that the choice need not be between complete destruction of liberal education and an incomplete war effort. It is not a case of one or the other, but one and the other; the cake must be sacrificed, but we can have our bread and eat it too.

The liberal arts courses to be given in these programs offer the best opportunity for the infusion of some liberal education into the education for war. This can only be accomplished if, after prescribing the broad outlines of the curricula, the men in the brass hats step aside and allow the educators to determine the details of the planning and instruction of the courses. The danger is that the Army and Navy may go further than the presentation of an outline, into questions of selection and presentation of material, with an eye to using these courses in History and English strictly as propaganda weapons. If this is allowed to happen, their value will be lost, both directly, to the prospective officers as a basis of later cultural growth, and indirectly, as a pool of liberal thought to improve the moral and human tone of our society and the atmosphere in which the peace is made.