HUMANISTIC EDUCATION AND WESTERN CIVILIZATION

These essays were written to honor the 65th birthday of an educational bulwark, the former University of Chicago president Robert M. Hutchins. They are all intellectually hefty; some are even wise, a few entertaining. Three seem destined for discussion elsewhere: Milton Mayer's witty whiplashing of our social sins (""But the competence we want and for which we cannot depend upon another is moral competence and we cannot get it from science""); Elizabeth Mann Borgese's governessy rundown of Western universalism; David Riesman's straightforward thoughts on innovation and reaction in study programs and seminars. All participants (the better-known include Mortimer Adler, Justice Douglas, Scott Buchanan) reflect Ortega's cry that modern man has no nature, he has only his history, his tangle of technology, materialism, bureaucratic beehives. The political cornerstone of a truly democratic culture depends on the humanities, on defined values, on philosophical precepts. The challenge to education lies there: in a revivification of the past to revolutionize the future.