Word: joads
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Eleven years ago, John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath carried the hapless Joad family westward on highway 66 to a life of debased poverty on California's big, corporate-owned farms. Since then the story of the impoverished migrant worker in the rich San Joaquin Valley had been told with seasonal regularity in fiction and fact. And sometimes the two got badly mixed, as a congressional subcommittee on education and labor reported scathingly last week...
...universities, Sir Walter charges, are trying to renounce their responsibility for the education of youth. Philosopher C.E.M. Joad, discussing The Crisis in the New Statesman and Nation, satirizes the university attitude: "You want an atom bomb? Right! We will make it for you. But we really can't concern ourselves with the use to which you propose to put it . . . You want a cathedral? Right! The architectural department will tell you how to build it. But whether you should worship in it or keep pigs in it is a question which falls outside our province...
Philosopher Joad especially deplores the technological-democratic tendency in education, which "seeks to enable a man to acquire a living rather than to acquire a life worth living." He advises "a return to . . . classical-humanism ... I would suggest that every student, whatever other subject he may be studying, should take . . . a compulsory course in the history and problems of philosophy, supplemented by the history of scientific ideas...
...Finally," Joad concludes, "such a course has been known to give men a serenity of outlook. It may not in our present age be the best dividend-payer from the purely utilitarian standpoint, but this at least may be said of it, that it sometimes enables men to despise the wealth that it prevents them from acquiring...
...once the letters column of the New Statesman bristled with arguments pro & con Freddie Ayer. Did his philosophy really lead to fascism? One professional philosophizer who sided with "Oxonian" was bush-bearded C.E.M. Joad. To accept Ayer's assumptions, wrote Joad, would be to agree "that there is no meaning in the universe . . . that it means nothing to say that Beethoven is a greater musician than Mr. Sinatra . . . that all talk about God ... is twaddle...