Education: Serious Summer

Seven centuries ago there was a generation of children who, having observed their elders’ repeated failure to wrest the Holy Sepulchre from the infidel Saracens by brute force, resorted to the quaint expedient of trudging down across Europe, struggling over the Mediterranean Sea and advancing upon Jerusalem with hands empty of weapons and hearts full of faith. It is not recorded that the Saracen militia were deeply affected by this display, nor that they yielded their stronghold until, some time afterwards,Frederick II ousted them by adroit diplomacy. Nevertheless, the tradition that young people make good auxiliary forces in idealistic undertakings, has persisted. It is manifest today in the literature of Hope and Understanding that is written about the Citizens of Tomorrow, the ushers of the Era of Good Will, the so-called “new” college students. Urged by elders with genius for “organizing” and by precocious contemporaries with faith in “the movement,” they are packing their suitcases by the hundred, sharpening pencils, inditing notebooks and crusading to Europe in smiling droves to “exchange viewpoints,” “discuss problems,” “promote sympathy” and effect a number of similar desirable ends so far neglected by the notorious Older Generation.

There is a National Student Federation, working in conjunction with a travel bureau called the Open Road Inc., which has arranged scores of tours for ardent crusaders, to whom the prospect of meeting European state officials and enjoying state banquets, lectures,or simply recognition and welcome, is irresistible. It is arrangedthat there shall be bountiful good fellowship between the crusaders and university students in the lands they visit. “In the walled garden of an old stone house in Normandy” many of the most faithful will gather in August to fraternize intensively and bleach all the sins of their respective diplomats with the bright rays of well systematized mutual confidence.

Somewhat less formal but equally hearty is the program proclaimed by a group of fearless Manhattan students who intend to ship in cattleboats or steerage, sleep in their clothes on European railroads, enter Sovietland and there gather first-hand material for what all government experts, professional press men and inquisitive business representatives are believed to have left unwritten—”a lucid and penetrating report on Russia.”

Nor will the importance of being earnest be forgotten by those who stay behind. A student college-camp has already opened in the Catskills for the summer, a camp of “doers” who are resolved to depend upon no external stimulus for their vigorous thought but to lecture to each other on “problems of the day” that they are severally exercised about.

Some 50 Radcliffe, Wellesley and Simmons college ladies have obtained their parents’ reluctant consent to spend the summer “seeing how the other half lives.” They will work in shops and factories, “go incognito and spend their leisure time as well as working hours exactly as the working girls do.”

At Bridgewater, Conn., “in George Pratt’s old tobacco barn,” a student summer university was opened last week by the National Student Forum. The first conferences, led by Editor Douglas Haskell of the New Student, were on the subject of college journalism. Future sessions, the prospectus explains, will be devoted to digesting, with the aid of college professors, various “green apples” lately laid before the “new” student—recent books on sociology, psychology, education, science, drama. Here, too, “good fellowship” is stressed. The scene is pastoral, the cost low, designed to suit “the overwhelming minority.” Host Pratt, a recent Harvard graduate, is a subeditor and financial backer of the New Student; devotes his energies to stimulating a spirit of liberal criticism, free speech, international consciousness, among U. S. undergraduates.