GRADUATION, UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND 267

man" or "educated woman" and by your deeds make it visible to the
people about you. But that will take some doing, perhaps a bit more
than some of you may now realize. What education is, and does, and
must do has been spoken of throughout the ages. "Education en-
franchises, " wrote Voltaire, reaching the heart of the matter in just
two words. "The future is a race between education and catastrophe, "
wrote H. G. Wells, a survival judgment few in times past and none in
times present have seriously questioned. Education and survival are
truly linked and we are not to take seriously the quote attributed to
an ex-governor five weeks ago when his car was rocked and besieged by
Dartmouth students. George Wallace—that's the Governor of Ala-
bama's husband—was speaking in the panic of the moment, and cer-
tainly not for posterity, when he said "Academic freedom can get you
killed!"

One harassed politician notwithstanding, I have yet to read or hear
it said that education is anything but good, and good for the receivers
of it. The debatable point is whether it's being put to good use.

Let's look at this. The dismal determinists of history remind us that
many of their gravest predictions remain uncontested. The doomsday
prophets tell us that education, for all its extension and refinement,
leaves civilization's child but a step past the primitives and perhaps
even on the way back to the ice age. We are warned that in prevailing
over simple ignorance, education may have pushed us to the more
dangerous super-ignorance of not knowing what to do with our new
found genius. Men, who today call themselves wise, reach back thou-
sands of years for words to prove their dark and dreary wisdom. Plato,
for instance, said "only the dead have seen the end of war, " and Walter
Lippmann only recently reasoned that because men have been bar-
barians much longer than they have been civilized they are only pre-
cariously civilized... that under stress and strain, under neglect and
temptation, man might revert to his first nature.

For all its contribution to the conquest of time and space, distance
and disease, who will concede that education has conquered the real
object of its thrust... man himself!

Maybe it's just a personal thing with me, maybe I'm the perennial
optimist, but when I read Plato, I search for the hope and not the
despair; the challenge and not the chagrin. The very same Plato,
who seemed to imply that men can't or won't change, also said that
they must—when he wrote: "Governments vary as the characters of
men vary. States are made out of the human natures which are in