Education: The World and Stanford

The possibilities of a worldwide educational organization were last week absorbing the London meeting of the United Nations education committee (TIME, Oct. 11). A bureau was proposed in which Great Britain, Russia and the U.S. would have one representative each, while large regions such as eastern Europe would have group representatives. Even before peace came, this body would begin such jobs as supplying liberated lands with educational books, laboratory equipment and films. And it would work constantly toward postwar intellectual cooperation.

In Washington, meanwhile, it was apparent that one group of U.S. educators was likely to swing the most weight with the State Department where international questions were concerned. This was the liberal group centering in Stanford University, which dominated last month’s international education conference at Harpers Ferry, W. Va. (TIME, Oct. 11) as against a rival committee led by New York University educators.

Stanford’s lean, earnest Dean of Education Grayson Neikirk Kefauver was already established at Washington with 1) indefinite leave of absence from the university, 2) the backing of the rich Columbia Foundation of San Francisco, 3) the advice of No. 1 Stanfordian Herbert Hoover, and 4) the conviction that big things can be done in international education. Dean Kefauver is the quarterback of a hard-driving Stanford educational backfield (Paul Hanna, Isaac James Quillen, Paul Leonard) whose energy is well known in professional pedagogical circles and seems bound to register soon on a much wider audience.