Lost Generation

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 409, 24 April 1947, Page 5

Lost Generation

T would have been a little de- ] pressing if the New Zealand delegates to the UNESCO Conference in Paris had returned with mouthfuls of fine phrases for the reconstruction of the world. — It would have meant that time, labour, and money had been expended for nothing. But airy optimism is just about the last thought anyone will have after reading our interview with Dr. Beeby on page 6 of this issue. The picture of the world he has brought back from Paris is just about as dismal -as anything we have ever asked our readers to look at and carry away to look at again. It is a picture of civilisation decapitated-schools gone, teachers missing, books burnt or lost, a whole generation with its eyes put out. Nothing so bad has been reported from Europe since the Dark Ages, and it would have been the last straw if the United Nations, after surveying all this devastation, had proposed to attack it with a slogan. We would all have known then, if we are more than infants, that Western civilisation was paralysed. But the impression Dr. Beeby leaves with us is that the Conference neither under -estimated the .destruction nor wasted time restoring it rhetorically, It saw that the first job was to get the lights going again, that anyone can start a panic in the dark, and that the darkest spots in Europe to-day are the minds of its lost generation of young people. So it started to work at once organising education again in those countries from which it has almost disappeared -looking for teachers, searching for books and buildings and other educational material likely to be available in time. For it has to be a race against time-a case of catching up on illiteracy before mischief-makers and lunatics begin using it. Everything evil as well as everything good, it points out, begins in the minds of mén. The task is to give the good a chance against the bad, peace a chance -against war, order a chance against chaos,