Mass Education and the Individual

Extract

Innumerable essays are being written on the uncertain future of the humanities, and on the obscure fate of a liberal education in the post-war world. The good intentions of the authors are clear, although their arguments are mingled with much idealism and not a few pious hopes. Those of us who deal with modern languages and their literatures gladly applaud whenever the importance of our field is vigorously upheld in public. We are sufficiently convinced of our educational significance to be willing to hang together in a common defense of our existence, and there is no need of repeating the commonplace burden of our song, that we are worth salvaging for the world after the war. But mere idealistic arguments leave us without a planned working program of effective intervention in that future, although the urgency of improvement in language teaching is clear to us all.