tunity and economic security for all regardless of race, creed, or national origin and the ideal of full and free personalities for allthat a basic frame of reference can and should be erected for the selection of significant facts, principles, and attitudes in the field of economics education. The following list does not by any means include all the possible facts and principles that could be covered. As a whole, nevertheless, it presents a picture of the type of facts, principles, and beliefs that can and should be explored in economics and related courses. An Educational Program 1. Students should be made acquainted with that part of the American Creed which has affirmed equality of opportunity and economic security since the days of Jefferson. They should also investigate in this connection the age-long conflict between human rights and property rights. 2. Students should be helped to see that the happiness and full growth of all Americans is dependent upon equality of opportunity and economic security for all; that promotion of the general welfare will act as a preventive against those psychological maladjustments which arise in people as members of majority and minority groups during normal and abnormal times. 3. The meaning and role of scapegoatism during periods of economic crisis should be considered. Creating an awareness of and the building up of an immunity against those irrational factors which prevent an objective approach to the solution of economic breakdowns are clearly in order if the objective economic facts taught are to be used effectively. 4. The role of pitting race against race, religion against religion, and nationality against nationality as a labor-splitting device must also be understood. Conversely, some employers are afraid to take the lead in breaking down economic discrimination against minority groups because of the attitudes of some of their workers. Recent positive advances by employers in this regard should be noted. 5. The understanding must be developed in students that exploiters and radicals are not peculiar to any one group or groups. Fascists would like to have us believe that they are, that all the members of some groups are innately greedy or envious. Furthermore, the exploitation or radicalism which exists in all groups must be re garded as arising from socio-historical conditions rather than from fixed biological or hereditary traits. 6. Economic activity should be viewed as the outgrowth of social and historical forces rather than of innate capacities and inclinations. One of the favorite charges of Fascists is that Jews avoid manual labor, especially farming. The reason for such non-agricultural activity in the past, is, of course, due to the fact that Jews were actually not permitted to own land in European countries and were driven to the cities. When they came to America, they naturally turned to those trades they had learned in Europe. Furthermore, the work of present day Jews as farmers in Palestine, the United States, and the Soviet Union, belies the Fascist claim. Other misconceptions would have us thinking that certain minority groups are mentally incapable or mechanically unsuited for certain types of work. In the words of Julius A. Thomas of the National Urban League, “Too often the cold fact is that too many white people think, and too many Negroes agree, that there are certain jobs to be filled by Negroes and certain jobs to be filled by whites." 7. Students should learn that America's wealth has been created by the brain and brawn of every single religious, racial, and ethnic group. America's economic well-being will rise when every group is able to participate fully in the American way of life. What the Carvers and Matzeligers have done for our economy in the past and present, future Carvers and Matzeligers can do in the future -provided they are given the opportunity. 8. White and yellow economic imperialism must go. In his Memorial Day speech of 1942, Mr. Sumner Welles said: "If this war is in fact a war for the liberation of peoples it must assure the sovereign equality of peoples throughout the world, as well as within the world of the Americas. Our victory must bring in its train the liberation of all peoples. Discrimination between peoples because of their race, creed, or color must be abolished. The age of imperialism is dead." Such imperialism has been the major cause for disharmony among the white and colored races of the world. In Africa, for example, black workers cannot resist the unjust wage treatment they receive because in most parts of that continent trade unions are illegal; needless to say, the nature of such illegality has been determined by the dominating white group and is experienced in terms of color. 9. The areas and various types of discrimination against minority groups should be investigated. The Citizens Emergency Conference for Interracial Unity held at Hunter College in September, 1943, declared "that discrimination in the employment and promotion of men and women workers of racial groups, especially in the white collar category, by utility companies, department stores, insurance and other large commercial concerns, constitutes one of the main forms of economic discrimination against minorities in this city, making for interracial friction." Also, there is discrimination in such matters as upgrading, seniority rights, training opportunities, and unequal pay for equal work. A study should likewise be made of those unions which discriminate and those which do not. In spite of continued discrimination against Negroes in employment, nearly half of American citizens-exactly 44 per cent-still believe that Negroes have the same chance as white people to earn a living in the United States, the National Opinion Research Center reported not so long ago. 10. A whole series of myths must be punctured: (a) Jews own all the wealth in the United States. (b) Negroes only want relief. The N.A.A.C.P. denounced a short (c) Minorities constitute a threat to our standard of living. 11. Discrimination in housing, health, wholesale and retail prac tices, and other economic areas should be considered. The efforts of some real estate interests in New York City to maintain a segregated and restricted area for Negroes in order to further their own profits should be exposed. The high incidence of tuberculosis among the Negro people in New York City as compared with that of whites has definite implications for the whole problem of economic wellbeing, for tuberculosis is not only a health problem but one of dollars and cents to those affected and the community as well. The special significance which the cooperative movement possesses for the Negro people in raising their purchasing power should be taken up. THE TIME IS NOW. Whether or not such intercultural material is to be given special "billing" or is to be incorporated into the curriculum as it now stands, is a matter for each school and each teacher to decide. There is much to be said for either approach. Only experience in handling this material and the course of economic discrimination outside the classroom will determine, in the final analysis, which of the two is more effective. Regardless of which approach is used, the introduction of such material cannot come too soon. For apart from the broad democratic issues involved, events are moving rapidly and already vicious propaganda designed to influence employers of Negro labor is appearing in the reports of one industrial advisory service widely circulated in war plants. Negroes are beginning to wonder whether the gains they have made will be wiped out right after this war as they were after the last war. In addition, reports from various sources indicate that we may be in for a post-war period of great unemployment-a Senate Military Affairs subcommittee a short while ago put the possible figures at 19,000,000. In such an event, a maximum amount of and, one might almost say, special kind of understanding and faith will be needed to help prevent the recurrence of scapegoatism and the resort to any other irrational and undemocratic strategy for the solution of economic ills. An economics curriculum with an intercultural orientation could go far in helping to develop such understanding and faith. Approaches to Intercultural Education JOSEPH GALLANT, Benjamin Franklin High School CAUTIONS. There can be no doubt that one phase of an intergroup good will program should consist of the presentation of the contributions made by different groups: (a) to world civilization; (b) to the growth and welfare of America. But certain cautions ought to be observed to avoid (a) misplaced emphasis; (b) strabismus and (c) banality. MISPLACED EMPHASIS. It is possible by emphasis placed on the special contributions of national or cultural groups to reenforce or to induce misconceptions about supposed special hereditary endowments of different nationalities or supposed national groups. Thus, students readily assume that artistic ability is inborn in Italians, but that mechanical ability is alien to Italians genetically, while Germans are technologists in their genes; and that Jewish blood is mercantile, or that there is a hereditary tendency among Jews to be physicians. The special contributions of such groups to civilization should, therefore, always be placed in the context of circumstance and historical conditioning. Germans have shown greater competence in technological occupations, relative to their numbers, since the industrial and scientific revolution in Germany; in the midnineteenth century, the British and the Yankees were regarded as the most mechanical and technical minded groups, while in the seventeenth century the Dutch and Flemings were the most mechanically inclined; and the Sicilians, Spaniards, or Chinese may be under appropriate historical or cultural influences among the most advanced technological workers of some future decade or generation, relatively and statistically, as they, indeed, probably were during the third century B.C., the twelfth A.D. and the first fourteen centuries A.D. respectively. The Russians, regarded as a most inept people only twenty or thirty years ago, have today become successful rivals of the Germans in industrial efficiency and skill in technics required for total war, as a result of changed social and educational circumstances. Rather than emphasize the special contributions to American life or to world civilization of various groups, it might be wise to teach the opinions of such modern geneticists as Morgan and Jennings that the hereditary potentialities of human beings are wide, diverse, and beyond our present capacity to understand, to analyze, or to chart, and that this applies with equal validity to all racial and cultural groups. Equally important, it should be demonstrated that the special interests, the crafts and vocations in which members of a group engage, are conditioned by their culture, while their culture itself is historically conditioned. Thus the fields of enterprise and occupation of the immigrant groups in America will be understood by students to be historic consequences, and not expressions of either their cupidity and monopolistic clannishness as is charged against some, or of their stupidity and lack of skill as is charged against others. Italians are vine growers and vintners in California for an obvious historical reason; Poles entered the coal fields because many of the first and most enterprising immigrants from Poland were miners from Silesia who established centers of Polish population in America in the |