Education: Culture by Card Indexes?

By last week, 41 nations had joined UNESCO, a body with an unwieldy name and an unwieldier problem: the crisis in world culture. Was UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) the right way to attack the problem? At Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art last week, English Art Critic Herbert Read asked that question. His answer: No.

UNESCO, with all its highbrow conferences and talky committees, is missing the whole point, said Read. It seems to assume "that culture is a concrete material . . . bartered like butter or steel . . . already stored up in universities, libraries and museums, waiting, like corn in Egypt, to be distributed to the hungry masses."

According to UNESCO's constitution, "wars begin in the minds of men . . ." If so, said Read, "they are not to be prevented by card indexes and encyclopedias, by documentary films and the circulation of lecturers. . .

"The minds of men are controlled only by some form of moral discipline. . . Discipline [is] the end, not the means of education ... We are all implicated in the decadence of our civilization, and it is only to the extent that our dull indifference is fused to a white heat of moral indignation and . . . activity that the future can have any promise of greatness . . . The person is the only ground in which a cultural renaissance can take place."