"UNPREPARED"

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 2, Issue 186, 15 July 1940, Page 6

"UNPREPARED"

AMERICAN YOUTH NOT READY FOR

CHANGE PUBLIC DEBATE ADVOCATED The charge that the United States and ■especially its younger generation, is morally unprepared for and intellectually uninformed about the world social "revolution" dcclbred to be spreading out from Europe to-day vras made by speakers at the final sessions of t'he 15th annual meeting of the American Association l'or Adult Education, which included a forum held in the Town HalL Unless the younger generation, now "sceptical of all slogans and preachments," becomes aware thai the issue before it is at bottom a moral and spiritual one, iit will be incapable of using "the only weapon Arifch which Fascism can be fought—the understanding that Fas cism is an evil and that a free society of free men is forth fighting for,'" Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, declared. Contending that political parties have failed to educate the electorate, Will Ham Hard, formerly assistant to tihe chairman of the Republican Natonal Committee, contended that neither American political parties nor those of Europe's various, democracies had warned their respective electorates of the world ambitions of Europe's new revolutionary organisation nor had taught t'hem to be as ready for defence as the aggressors were for attack. Mr Hard urged that a nenv nonpartisan "citizen agency" be set up, fostered perhaps by the Adult Education, which would be dedicated to the better political education of the American people through the mobilisation of facts on vital- approaching problems and tho presentation of them in attractive form. "We have agencies for the collection of fact, and for promoting this and that special idea,"' he said. '<We need. an. agency for assembling all .the facts .and all the ideas, one that can paint for us a composite picture of the world into which our republic is moving."'