One World's History

The very phrase "educators' conference" suggests somehow a group of limp, ineffectual men who foregather periodically to offer noble, impractical suggestions to universities which receive them in stony silence. Actually, educators are capable of saying things that need listening to and the conclusions of last week's conference including Dean Emeritus Roscoe Pound-which met at Princeton, were bright, forthright, and in large measure need acting on. Their big, blunt theme is that the world's universities are "strongholds of nationalism," that, "so long as this is true, universities actually can unwittingly promote war," and that "they should have one responsibility above all-to take the lead in helping nations to understand each other, and in training young men to think in terms of one world, not one country." While this may seem a strange and arbitrary formulation of the purpose of a university, the carrying through of one recommendation, among the several made is for Harvard practicable and imperative: the College should require that all candidates for its degrees demonstrate a knowledge of the elements of World History.

Undoubtedly, in these days of speed-up, with graduate schools calmly demanding a Magna for admission, no suggestion can seem more loathsome than that of a new degree requirement. Yet in the General Education program a quite drastic, closely related change is being effected without strong, opposition simply because it makes sense. The sense to a requirement of a knowledge of the large out lines of World History is plain too if only on the level that it can help stave off unnecessary war hysteria. In this connection, a recent study-also made at Princeton-found that "30 million Americans of voting age had no idea at all of Russia's form of government." Despite the special, and to a large degree just, claims of philosophy, economics and the sciences to equal consideration, the conclusions of the educators at Princeton, and of simple ratiocination on the world scene, indicate that a knowledge of World History is an irreducible, a first step in fighting mass ignorance of this sort.

Harvard would therefore do well to require such an examination as surely as it does the swimming test. Its practicability is shown by the Bible. Shakespeare examinations in English and History and Literature: one wouldn't have to study for them if he were lucky enough to know the elementary material involved. This test, no more than the admirable General Education courses, would not settle forever our search for "a common core of knowledge"; but it would at least help students avoid the temptation of meekly submitting their destinies to whoever happens at a given moment to be making our policy.