Education: Bringing Up Radio

With an introduction by President Hoover and an impressive list of speakers there began last week a great movement to bring U. S. Radio to cultural maturity. In Manhattan's New School for Social Research met the National Advisory Council on Radio in Education, which in April announced its program, to be financed for the next three years by John Davison Rockefeller Jr. and the Carnegie Corporation (TIME, April 13). Sitting in the New School's oval auditorium, the council heard broadcast from the White House the voice of President Hoover, introducing to them the voice of their president, Dr. Robert Andrews Millikan, director of the California Institute of Technology. Said President Hoover: "Dr. Millikan is more than a physicist. He has given to America great contributions in the whole field of education and science. He is one of America's leaders in philosophic thought. Dr. Millikan will now speak to you from Los Angeles, California."

Radio's Pedigree. In a somewhat rambling discourse Dr. Millikan said: "The radio is obviously one of the great new unifying and educational forces. . . . If you do not believe in it because you fear its use by the demagogue and the propagandist, then you despair of the ultimate success of widespread ballot governments as such, and you can logically join one of the two world groups, the Soviets, and in somewhat lesser degree the Fascisti, which [attempt] to push the world back ... to the time when the Pharaoh under the strategy of his Prime Minister, Joseph, became an absolute despot. . . . Any talk of loss of liberty through the monopolistic control of the ether ... is too grotesque to need to be given more than a line in an address like this. . . ."

Of the relation between Science and Faith, he said: "In the old days men had made a wholly artificial and irrational distinction between the natural and the supernatural. Events which were sufficiently common and familiar were thought of as natural, and events which were uncommon and not understood were called supernatural. The idea of the uniformity and repeatability of events abolished completely all such childlike distinctions. All events without exception are worthy of study and of attempts at understanding, because Nature is assumed to be dependable, not capricious.

"All this is what we discover when we try to look up radio's pedigree."