'Civil Courage' Necessary For Peace, Asserts Conant

Following is a major excerpt from the address delivered by President Conant in Memorial Church Tuesday.

"Fear is too common a human failing for us to need invoke it as an aid to any cause, however good. The great moments in human history are records of collective or individual courage; the leaders of a free people rightly rely on the courage of each and every citizen, not only in times of war but in the days of peace.

"We are at the beginning of a period of psychological reconversion no less important than the readjustment of our economic life. The moral imperatives of the battlefield must be transformed into those of a free society which believes in the supreme significance of each individual man or woman.

Same War and Peace Goals

"War and peace are, as regards methods, miles apart; but as regards objectives, this war for us, a free people, has been identical with the job that now lies ahead-keeping open the road of freedom.

There was a danger, as I pointed out ... (before the war) "that the winning ... (of it) would engender such conditions in our minds that we would be unable to preserve liberty when victory had come. There are few signs that such is indeed the case.

"On the contrary, on all sides we see evidence that the nation recognizes fully the necessity for reorienting our sights. We know that the end no longer justifies the means. We know that the collective demands of a group--a ship's company, a regiment or a bombing crew--no longer have life or death hold over an individual. For military courage we must substitute civic courage.

"Fear, panic, foolish short-sighted action--thus runs the well-known sequence of words describing the road of human folly. The reserve pattern--courage, cold examination, intelligent farsighted action--is admittedly all too rare, but is always available as an alternative even for the sons of Adam. Listen for the emotional overtones in a group discussion. Whether they portray fear or proclaim courage will usually provide the key to the subsequent course of a bit of human drama...

The educational implications of an emphasis on civil courage are similar to those which arise when one stresses such phrases as 'the moral responsibility of the individual.'

Three hundred years ago a wise man said that 'to be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to be always a child.' But the color of the glasses through which one views the past is influenced by and in turn influences or emotional attitudes toward different sets of values.

To read history either with a sneer or conversely only after the black pages have been deleted, is the equivalent of drinking water from a poisoned well. To be sure, cold, unemotional, purely factual analysis of human history is difficult and a similar examination of contemporary events is impossible to achieve.

"Yet the easy attitudes of complete cynicism on the one hand or Pollyanna optimism on the other are equally disastrous; it is a narrow and perilous knife edge that teacher and student alike must walk.

"Yet walk it we must, for in one way or another a large portion of the non-vocational education of a citizen must be concerned with a study and analysis of fairly recent occurrences involving human beings. The spirit with which such study is undertaken is, therefore, a matter of great significance for the future of the nation.

Cites Need for Adult Behavior

"The battle is the pay-off for new weapons, as many a scientist and engineer have come to realize in the course of their wartime education. Similarly, adult behavior is the only measure of education as regards an individual or a group.

"There can be only one verdict as to the overall effects of the education of German your during the last hundred years. To the extent that we see in the down fall of that country a failure in education, we become aware of the responsibility of our schools, colleges, and agencies of adult education.

"Is it too much to place the task of developing a maximum degree of civil courage high on the list of priorities for our teachers, our writers and our public speakers?

Is it too much to as that in our discussions of education at all stages we never lose sight of the kind of behavior a free society must demand of its responsible citizens?

"Not if I read the past correctly; not if I discern at all accurately the true dimensions of those problems of the future now only dimly visible but which He across our course in the years ahead.