Professional Documents
Culture Documents
21, 1941
This brain trust met at a conference of the New Education Fellowship, 26-year-old
international organization of Progressive Educators, convening for the first time in the
Western Hemisphere. Ann Arbor, bright with intense sunshine and the chatter of 1,800
delegates from 22 nations, had a Geneva flavor. At the last moment the Fellowship
learned that its president, Finland's Laurin Zilliacus, had been detained. He cabled
enigmatically from Finland: LEAVING FOR THE FRONT. . . . STILL BELIEVE IN
DEMOCRACY.
But while delegates talked, Reinhold Schairer and his fellow conspirators retired to a
conference room to put their dreams on paper. It was an oddly assorted group: small,
baldish John Bell Condliffe, eminent Australian economist now teaching at University of
California; Ivor Armstrong Richards (Basic English), of Cambridge University and
Harvard; Progressive Educator William Heard Kilpatrick, of Columbia University's
Teachers College, and his vigorous wife; dark young Philosophy Professor Max Black, of
University of Illinois; stocky young Robert Bauer, an Austrian youth leader; bush-browed
Malcolm MacLean, president of Hampton Institute; others of whose practical idealism
Leader Schairer felt sure.
Dr. Schairer's ideas won support among British educators. A year ago he arrived in the
U.S., soon formed a U.S. Committee on Educational Reconstruction. Famed Frank
Aydelotte, ex-president of Swarthmore, became its chairman, and Dr. Schairer got a
fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation to finance his studies. By last week he had
addressed 140,000 U.S. citizens from coast to coast, won many a bigwig to his cause.
Such was the background of Dr. Schairer's conference in Ann Arbor last week. Basic
assumption in his group's discussions: at war's end Hitlerism will be defeated and Europe
will be chaotic. Not ready to plump for the Danish scheme, the brain trust nevertheless
favored a decentralized economic system, held that electrification would make it possible
to disperse industry. At week's end, they announced their plan:
> A small "action group" will be organized with the U.S. Committee on Educational
Reconstruction as its nucleus.
> Democratic governments, U.S. and foreign, will be urged to begin now to plan and
budget for reconstruction.
> Experts will be recruited and trained in the U.S. in agriculture, education, health,
nutrition, arts, crafts, cooperatives.
> When the hour strikes, all these experts will march into the ruined countries and begin
to educate their people by feeding their children, giving medical care, rebuilding houses
and public services.
> They will be assisted by an army of inside experts, many of whom are already secretly
stationed in the totalitarian countries.
> Steps will promptly be taken for employment in Europe's rebuilding of every able-
bodied person, especially youths (of whom Dr. Schairer estimates there will be
20,000,000 unemployed after the war), if necessary by new agencies like the Chinese
cooperatives, British Youth Councils, NYA, CCC.
> The experts will then proceed to help organize the new democratic order. Some of its
principles: equal educational opportunity for all, opportunity for every youth to do useful
work and serve society, respect for the dignity of man ("Every man is an end in himself
and may not be used merely as a means.").
Delay in preparing for reconstruction, Schairer & Co. warned, may result in failure not
only to win the peace but to win the war. Said they: "[We] assume that Hitlerism cannot
be permanently defeated on the field of battle alone, but only in the hearts and minds of
men, and especially of youth. ... To develop, men need action; to act, men need faith; to
keep faith, men need reason; to direct all three, men need a vision of excellence."