We think our civilization near its meridian, but we are yet only at the cock-crowing and the morning star. In our barbarous society the influence of character is only in its infancy.

There are sufficient examples of excellence among professional educators; what we lack as a group is thorough competence. This competence should be our goal, for it is the most demanding goal we can set ourselves.

Federal and state agencies, credit bureaus, employers, insurers, schools, and many others constantly collect detailed data about us all; and the safeguards ensuring that access to this data will be withheld from those who should not be privy to it are weak. In response, public opposition to the abuse of privacy is increasing; and fortunately, jurists are looking for ways to prevent interested organizations from misusing the power to preserve and retrieve information about our private lives. To abet those trying to prevent the abuse of privacy, let us reaffirm the proper use of privacy.

The threat of ignorance should make us cautious of proposals to enlist educational institutions in all-out efforts to solve issues here and now. The educator, whether teacher or student, is responsible not only to the present, but to the future as well.

Let us reform general education by making it the study of pedagogy, the formative theory of man. Such a reform would be the fundamental step towards the revitalization of the university, for with it, students would have a better opportunity to become once again an independent, countervailing power to their teachers. To institute this reform we do not primarily need new programs; we need rather a new type of practice, one suitable to the student qua student.

A community must maintain a pervasive variety of virtues to which we are all in proximity and from which we each can form significant standards. Without such a variety of virtues, publicity will induce blind arrogance in the leaders and spineless mediocrity in their followers. We have gone far in this direction, especially far in public education.

We have at our command great new tools of communication; and when we learn to use these intelligently, we can perhaps realize man's recurrent dream of culture and anarchy.

The school, the university, and the media of communication are universal institutions whose officials enjoy direct relations with the people of the world. The aesthetic, intellectual, and moral principles that inform the relations between teachers and students are universal principles that do not vary according to the whims of political, religious, or economic orthodoxy. It does not, therefore, seem impossible that should the school manage to separate itself from the state, the cultural institutions will then become the basis of a world community. Here, perhaps, is the seed of our future.