Education: Brave New World

Nightly the European ether is filled with rival government propaganda in the form of distorted news broadcasts. Save only France, every Continental power engages in this practice of poisoning men’s minds. Because even so far away as New Zealand British citizens are fed honeyed. anti-British words from Berlin and Rome, Great Britain fortnight ago decided to supply an antidote. It announced that British Broadcasting Corporation would begin to send out “straight news” in seven languages to undeceive misinformed mankind.

Last week, however, the U. S. went a step farther than Britain. Not merely to counteract propaganda which leads to hatred and misunderstanding, but actively to promote international friendship, the U. S. Government went on the air to sing not its own praises but those of its neighbors. Over 65 Columbia Broadcasting System stations, the most elaborate educational radio program ever attempted by the Government began ”Brave new world! The story of Latin America. . . . Twenty nations with a history and culture to be admired and a democratic ideal we share.”

In 26 weekly plays, of which last week’s was the first, the U. S.. Office of Education will dramatize for U. S. citizens Latin-American history, heroes, culture and wealth. Said U. S. Education Commissioner John W. Studebaker: “This will probably be the first time in history that one government has spent time and money on a sustained effort to help its own citizens appreciate the ideals of people across the border.”

Over $1,000 a week of WPA funds have been allotted to the Office of Education Radio Project for this series. Columbia, putting it on as a sustaining program, will spend about three times as much. Inspired by the 1936 Buenos Aires conference, Commissioner Studebaker and Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles hatched the idea a year ago. The programs, based on careful historical research by a staff headed by Dr. Samuel Guy Inman, adviser to the U. S. delegates at Buenos Aires, are checked by university professors, Pan American Union authorities and the Office of Education, but not by the State Department, which diplomatically avoids seeing the scripts. These have been in preparation for six months under Dr. William Dow Boutwell, directorof the Federal radio project, and Irving Reis, CBS production director.

Last week the first of the broadcasts, employing music (by WPA Musician Rudolph Schramm) and a blood & thunder script (by Broadway Playwright Bernard Schoenfeld). told of the departure from Santo Domingo of three conquistadors, Pizarro, Cortes and Balboa, to search for gold on the mainland. Its dramatic climax: his following reduced by fever and cowardice to twelve men, Pizarro faces toward Peru on the sands south of Panama, shouts: “We are 13 against the jungle! . . . Thirteen against the heathen !”