8

UNESCO COURIER-Page 2 MARCH I 952

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* A centre where young choreographerscan work out new ideas in the ballethas recently been created in GreatBritain. Named Ballet Workshop, thenew centre is part-studio, part-theatre.Dancers are chosen from a roster ofyoung performers and sometimesstudents from a nearby ballet schoolare used. Volunteer labour, ingenuityand the help of leading ballet companieshave reduced production costs to only£15 two £20.

* The method of collective paintingsfor children has been introduced toboys and girls of school age in Japanfollowing the publication of the July-August issue of the Courier devoted tochildren's art. An illustrated article inthat issue described how paintings areexecuted collectively by groups ofParisian children.

* Vienna is organizing a Scandinavianfestival to illustrate the links unitingAustria with the Nordic countries. Thecelebrations, to be held in the first weekof this month, include exhibitions onNorwegian art and Scandinavian books.

* Sixty-five nations have signed oneof the most sweeping agreements everreached. It allocates frequencies for allthe world's radio stations-fromstandard broadcasting stations to aero-planes and ships, world-wide telegraphand telephone systems and experiment-al and amateur stations. All of thesewere fitted into their own places in theradio frequency spectrum. The bodywhich instituted the agreement,the International TelecommunicationsUnion, is the oldest international orga-nization in existence. It was foundedin 1865, and is now one of the SpecializedAgencies of the United Nations.

* More than 50, 000 Ara. b refugeechildren are now attending classesin emergency schools opened by theUnited Nations Relief Works Agencyand Unesco. An equal number isbeing accommodated in private andstate schools in the Gaza area,the Kingdom of Jordan, Lebanonand Syria. But that still leaves some46 per cent of the children between sixand 14 without schooling.

* Five of the ten ratifications neededhave now been obtained for a Unesco-sponsored agreement which will abolishimport duties on books, newspapers,works of art, educational films,newsreels, sound recordings, scientificequipment for approved institutions,and educational materials for the blind.Pakistan is the fifth nation to ratify.Previous countries were Yugoslavia,Ceylon, Thailand and Cambodia.

Twenty-two other countries have signedbut net yet ratified the agreement.Eleven of these have taken action tosecure parliamentary approval.

* A society for the advancement ofscience in EI Salvador has just beenestablished as a result of the work ofthe Unesco Scientific Co-operationCentre for Latin America. The asso-ciation is one of the first results of therecent showing in El Salvador of aUnesco travelling scientific exhibition

* The Tate Gallery in London-oneof the world's finest art collections-is organizing a scheme to lend someof its masterpieces to Britain's smallerprovincial towns. Like many otherimportant museums, the Tate hasinsufficient space to display all its

THREE SCHEMES TO EASETHE PAPER SHORTAGE

Responses to Unesco's campaignfor effort to ease the u'orld papershorlage haee come from Finland,France and Costa Rica. Finland isincreasing its newsprint productionby 25 per cent./) An official of theFinnish A ssociation of Paper Millsannounced that Unesco's campaign"has partly been responsible forthis planned new production."InParis, students are busily collectingold newspapers, magazines andother paper, in accordance with aplan arranged by France's paper in-dustry Between one-and-a-half andtwo tons of paper are being gather-ed daily in this 1AJUY from privatefamilies, embassies, offices andshops. Students earn lJiy amountsfrom the paper [hey turn in. InCosta Rica the government is study-ing a scheme for the setting-up ofthe first paper mill industry sin Cen-tral America.

pictures. The new scheme will thusprovide a new opportunity for provin-cial townspeople to view outstandingworks of art.

* A Food and Agriculture Organizationreport published in Rome last Januarystates that only 10 per cent of theworld's land surface is under cultiva-tion. North America, with only two percent of the world's agricultural popula-tion and 15 per cent of the farm land,feeds its own peoples and is an impor-tant exporter of foodstuffs. Asia, with63 per cent agricultural population and17 per cent of the farm land, is under-nourished.

* University courses in technicalassistance are now being organized inthe Netherlands and the United States.An International Academic Institute isto be established this year in theNetherlands which will provide specialcourses on the various aspects ofeconomic development of countriesrequiring technical aid. In the U. S-.Haverford College will train techniciansby courses which stress methods ofincreasing production and improvinghealtn and living conditions in under-developed areas.

* The most complete source book ofmusical works produced in all thecountries of the world is to be preparedby the International MusicologicalSociety and the International Associa-tion of Musical Libraries under theauspices of the International MusicCouncil. The survey will cover allmusical works, in both printed andmanuscript form, produced prior to1800. In addition, a series of catalogueswill provide detailed information onall musical sources up to the presentday.

* During 1951, a substantial increasewas made in Venezuela's educationbudget, a large part of this expenditurebeing devoted to literacy teaching anda fundamental education centre at PaloNegro. Teachers'salaries were in-creased and 800 more teachers wereemployed. In three years the numberof pupils has risen by 142, 000.

* The U. N. reports that the populationof the world was approximately2, 400, 000, 000 in mid-1950. Accordingto information released by the Statis-tical Office of the United Nations,populations by continents were : Africa,198, 000, 000 ; North America, 216, 300, 000 ;South America, 111, 400, 000 ; Asia (ex-cluding USSR), 1, 272, 000, 000 ; Europe(excluding USSR), 396, 000, 000 ; Oceania,12, 900, 000 ; USSR, 193, 000, 000 (1946total).

* The world's population is increasingby at least 25, 000, 000 yearly. Netincrease of births over deaths isapproximately 60, 000 each day, 2, 500each hour, 41 each minute. The realcause in the rate of growth is thesteadily declining death rate.

Some population figures : Japan :83, 000, 000. Life expectancy for malesis 58 ; for females, 61-eleven yearsmore than in pre-war days. Itaty :population increase, 450, 000 a year.India : population increase, 42, 000, 000 inlast ten years. Puerto Rico : populationincrease from 1, 869, 225 in 1940 to2, 210. 703 in 1950.

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MARCH) 952 Page 3-UNESCO COURIER

Southern

fights the I

against illii

by Carlo LEVI

Author of'c hrist

Stopped at Eboli'

Photo, raph. by DavId Seymour

POST-WAY Italy has shown an amazing spiritof enterprise, as if a long pent-up vitalityhad suddenly found release and come out

as naturally as the leaves on the trees unfolding,after winter had ended, under the first warm raysof the sun. Every man has gone his own wayand set about working out the solution of hisindividual difficulties, but at the same time aneffort has been made to attack some deep-rootedevils which are incompatible with today'satmosphere of freedom. One of these. efforts,which has been carried out with scanty financialsupport, but with genuine energy and devotion,is the battle against illiteracy.

Illiteracy is a long-standing plague of Italiansociety and varies greatly from one end of thepeninsula to the other. In the last century,when Italy was in the process of achievingnational unity, illiterates made up the majorityof the population. The Government hastened toinstall compulsory elementary schools and withina few decades the population of the urban andindustrial North was as literate as that of themost advanced countries of Europe.

But for many reasons, progress in the Southwas much less easy. The most recent nation-wide statistics (1931) indicated 40 per cent ofilliteracy in Sicily, 46 per cent in Lucania and48 per cent in Calabria. During the Fascistregime the problem was passed over in silence andappeared to have been forgotten. Then, with thewar, the destruction of roads and school buildings,the dispersion of families and the general povertyand confusion, the problem became more difficultto solve than ever.

THIS complex phenomenon of large-scaleilliteracy is, of course, closely tied up withthe economic and social conditions of the

South. We may say, in a general way, that illite-racy is born of poverty and breeds more povertyin its turn ; it arises where there is an absence ofdemocracy and tends to perpetuate this absence.But if one of its causes is strictly economic, theother has social, political and spiritual impli-cations which are a concomitant of the structure

of the state and the form of its culture. The twocauses are connected and, indeed, interdependent,and for this reason no partial solution of theproblem can be achieved.

Anyone can see the relationship betweenilliteracy and poverty. A map illustrative of itsdistribution would show that it goes hand in handwith barren land, bad sanitary conditions, mala-ria, and the lack of industries, communicationsand public works. Miserably poor families mustput their children to work early. They send theboys to watch over herds of goats grazing on thedesolate clay, and put the girls to cooking,cleaning, watching over the babies, weavingbaskets and carrying jars of water from thedistant well. The school is, in most cases, far

BESIDES these causes of illiteracy, there is, tomy mind, another category of underlyingreasons which, paradoxically, make the

peasants'ignorance an asset in their own eyes.They live in an immobile and timeless world.circumscribed by ancient rites and customs andthe tasks imposed by the changing seasons ; yet,a world that is rich in human values and a cultureall its own. There is a peasant way of life that isradically different from our modern urban civi-lization ; a peasant art and a peasant philosophythat have been handed down without benefit ofthe written word in the heritage of legends, folk-tales, popular dramas and songs, all of whichhave inspired or enriched our more sophisticatedart forms.

The peasant, living alone on the land, iscontent with this artistic and philosophictradition, with this poetry of proverbial wisdomtranscribed into doggerel verse. The observanttraveller cannot fail to be struck by the frequencywith which the peasants speak in rhyme andmake use in their dialect of highly poetic images

(Continued on next sage.)

away ; there is not enough money to buy booksand notebooks, and frequent illness keeps thechildren at home.

The townships and villages are as poor as thefamilies, and the central Government is distant.Schoolhouses, like roads, sewers, heat and light,are often lacking. When the winter wind blowssnow down from the mountains people becomeisolated.

Under these conditions it is easy to appreciatethe difficulties of learning to read and write.And, to the illiteracy of children, we must addthat of those adults who once had some schoolir. gbut who, for lack of practice, have forgotten allthey ever knew. The hard life of the peasantsdoes not leave much time for that miracle ofcommunication, the written word. And it isplain enough why poverty and illiteracy fall intoa vicious circle. The illiterate peasant ishampered in any attempt to better. his lot ; heis condemned to stay on the land without anypossibility of migrating or raising his socialstatus. And so it is that he hands down the stateof servitude into which he was born.

Italy

battle

reracy

UNESCO COURIER-Page 4 MARCH 1952

Children and adults willingly walk miles from outlyingfarms to reach classes in southern Italy. ThisCalabrian road, blocked by snow during part of year,branches off to a path leading to Saucci village.

Entrance to People's Cultural Centre in RogianoGravina. Children attend school here by day, adultsin the evening. Twenty-eight similar Centres havenow been set up in this region to fight illiteracy.

Elementary school in San Nicola da Crissa, Calabria.Until recently the fifth grade was the end of schooling.Now instruction continues for older boys and girls,and libraries and youth clubs playa very active part.

The workshop at the Rogiano Gravina Cultural Centre. The boys are busily pre-paring relief maps of Italy for schools in the neighbourhood. The Centre alsoorga"i" ; ne cultural evenings, musical bands, amateur dramatics for young people.

Antonio Janni teaches in Saucci, but lives in Bagaladi, ten miles away. Everymorning he drives his motor scooter over tortuous roads to school. When thechildren leave in the afternoon, Janni stays to teach adults reading and writing.

NEW ENTHUSIASM FOR LEARN ING

ITS SWEEPING SOUTHERN ITALY

(Continued from previous age)

such as would put to shame not only the averagecity dweller but many a professional writer aswell.

The written word is for the peasants a symbolof the remoteness of the central Government, ofa feudal bond which has never grown into a rightto full citizenship. It is, in short, the expressionof a hostile civilization. And the peasants opposeit with their own hostility. They react bydefending their own ignorance, as if by so doingthey could protect ancient values from corruptionand shield themselves from a hostile world.

FINALLY, there are two factors that makethe peasants feel that book learning issuperfluous. First is the virtual lack of

publications concerned with life as they live it,with the work they do seen from their own pointof view. And second is the existence of varyingdialects, and the fact that the peasants thinkof the Italian language, properly speaking, as aliterary creation or one reserved for publicdocuments. The survival of dialects is anotherform of self-imposed peasant segregation.

It is plain from the above that the problem ofilliteracy is a complex one. It is not sufficientto allot specific funds to combat it or even toconcentrate upon raising the living standard c

the population. In order to overcome deep-rootedsubjective and psychological obstacles the statemust become more truly democratic. The peasantsmust realize and join in what the Governmentis trying to do, so that they may no longerconsider themselves estranged from the rest ofthe nation, but feel themselves to be an integralpart of it. Of course, the opposite is equallytrue, and the battle against illiteracy is one ofthe chief means to render the nation moredemocratic.

In every period of political and economic prc-gress peasants feel the need of wider knowledge.They then spontaneously abandon their positionof resistance and hostility. At such times theylook on their ignorance as standing in the wayof a freedom within their grasp.

With political parties and trade unions thrownopen to them, and a possibility of improving theirsituation and becoming fully-sledged citizens ofthe nation, instead of serfs and outlaws, thepeasants of the south have shown a real urge inthe last few years to achieve education. We musttake advantage of this state of mind and not letthem sink back into their old discouragementand resignation. Every effort to satisfy theirneeds is a blow struck for enduring democracy.For if the peasants are given a fair chance theywill not turn to desperate political remedies oranarchical acts of violence and plunder. Thebrigandage of the last century had the samecauses as those which give rise to illiteracy.

its the end of the last war, the Italian Governmentundertook an extensive campaign against illiteracyin southern Italy. Since 1947, when a special law

was passed, the lIlinistry of Public Education has set up11, 000 public courses which have been attended by some300, 000 adults and young people. This government actionwas paralleled by the creation of a series of privateinstitutions, one of the most outstanding of which is theNational League for the Struggle Against Illiteracy. TheLeague began its u'ork in 1948. It opened numerousschools tor illiterates and semi-literates. In 1949, themost original institution of the League took form : thePeople's Cultural Centre. Today} 28 such centres areactive, scattered through the regions of Calabria, Lucaniaand Sardinia. Each has a structure and character of itsown. The head of each centre is a teacher appointed by

IT is a hard job to prepare a corps of teacherswho know their material, are aware of thesocial importance of the job, and an.

acquainted with the customs, needs and interestsof their pupils. There is a pressing need fortextbooks which would appeal to the adultpeasant, with his store of ancient wisdom, ratherthan to a school child ; and for newspapers, ma-gazines, books, calendars and pamphlets adaptedto the world in which the peasants live. NoGovernment office is likely to think things outso subtly and yet the means required are almosttoo large to be provided by private initiative.

Government action is necessary, but it is alsoinadequate, for it cannot altogether dispel thepeasants'lingering distrust. Lasting results canbe obtained only if their spontane9us desire tolearn is satisfied with the proper tools.

the League who invites all competent persons in the coy-munity-the agricultural engineer, the doctor, themechanic, the veterinarian, the parish priest-to answerquestions asked by the students.

The'work of the League against illiteracy has O'wakeneàgreat interest. It has obtained the moral and financialsupport of numerous national and international organiza-tions. Recently, Unesco decided to include the NationalLeague for the Struggle Against Illiteracy among its As-sociated Projects in Fundamental Education, and willprovide information to aid it in its work. Reciprocally,the League will inform Unesco regularly of its progressand accomplishments. An international expert fromUnesco is now in Calabria helpin. q to organize specificmethods of dealing with students'questions and class-room discussion.

Immediately after the war circumstances werepropitious. A group of somewhat romanticallyidealistic young men of Calabria and Lucaniawere inspired by the ferment of popular feelingto start a large-scale drive for person-to-personteaching, such as was carried out so effectively inMexico. Soon they had joined their efforts withthose of the National League for the StruggleAgainst Illiteracy in Rome, an organization ofwomen volunteers.

- w ACK of funds somewhat curtailed this group'sefforts but at the same time gave them amore definite and practical character.

In May, 1947, an investigation was conducted byyoung social workers in Lucania in order to getan exact picture of what should be done. As wehave seen, there were no up-to-date statistics onilliteracy, and those of almost twenty years ago

could not be considered reliable. This inves-tigation proved that the problem was indeed aserious one. In all of Lucania there were onlythirty-six school buildings : twenty-eight in the121 townships of the Province of Potenza andeight in the twenty-eight townships of the pro-vince of Matera. In other localities, schoolingwas given under private roofs, often in attics,cellars or shacks.

When the statistics that were garnered fromthese investigations were compared with Armyrecords it was discovered that illiteracy wasmore widespread among adults born in 1926than among those born between 1915 and 1920.These same statistics also showed the extent towhich adults who once learned to read hadrelapsed into illiteracy. Questionnaires were usedto determine the exact reasons for failure toattend elementary school and a study was madeof local living conditions. In this way there wassome concrete basis for further action.

The first step was to provide a channel throughwhich the peasants could express their ambitionto learn, and this took form in local villageCommittees to Battle Illiteracy. So many ofthese were created that on January 24-25, 1948,their secretaries held a regional meeting inMatera and agreed to work closely with themayors and school-teachers of their villages.Gatherings were held in the public squares,loudspeakers carried the message into the streets

and persuasive people of goodwill made a door-to-door campaign. Their propaganda wassincere because they were not strangers butpeople on the spot who understood the peasantswith whom they were dealing.

WITHIN a fortnight adult education groupssprang up all over Lucania. They werelodged in a strange variety of quarters.

There were so many applications that courseswere swamped. Where three classes had beenannounced, they had to be increased to five thenext day and ten the day after, until there wasno place left to hold them.

At Muro Lucano a carabiniere had to preserveorder among those who were turned away ; andat Tricarico they sat silently outside the impro-vised schoolroom while their more fortunatefellows attended the lesson. The village ofBernalda, which is subject to frequent electricpower failures, decided that private houses couldremain dark while the lights were on for nightclasses in the school-house. The peasantsthemselves strung wires and installed the light-ing. Now it shines out over the mountain-topvillage.

(This article is copyright and must not be reproducedwithout permission.)

Page 5-UNESCO COURIERMARCH 1952

300, 000 ADULTS AND CHILDREN

HAVE ATTENDED 11, 000 COURSES

UNESCO COURIER-Page 6 MARCH 1952

UNESCO CAN HELP TO CHECK MILITARISM)

SAYS GERMAN FEDERAL PRESIDENT

DR. THEODOR HEUSS

welcomes entry intoUnited Nations Agency

-UNESCO'S decision to admitGermany as one of itsMember States proves its

concern for universality. This, Ibelieve, is bound to benefit Unescoboth materially and spiritually.

There is one thing, however, Ishould like to stress in order todestroy certain stupid rumours onehears sometimes. That thing isthat Unesco in no way seeks to coverall minds with a uniform coat ofpaint or to make all peoples danceto the same tune. Unesco's job israther to open men's eyes so thatthey greet one another withunderstanding and friendliness, andnot as strangers. He who travelsfrom one end of the world to theother only to make up his mindthat everything is better in his owncountry might just as well havesaved himself the time and troubleof his journey. But he who findseverything better outside his owncountry is probably nothing morethan an ignorant philistine. Somekind of enlightened curiosity towardhumanity as a whole is necessaryif we are to conquer sentiments ofsuperiority towards the ways of lifeand ideas of other peoples.

The word"'tolerance"oftenappears in works published byUnesco. This is a splendid word,but only if it implies a definiterespect for other people's ways-notjust a passive and indulgentacceptance.

It is only in this light that theabstract phrases of the UniversalDeclaration of Human Rights takeon colour and life. Religious andphilosophic traditions no less thansocial and political experience whichare part of the spiritual history ofmankind find in the Declarationtheir common denominator. But ifthe Declaration of Human Rights isto be more than just the reflectionof a fleeting moment in history, menmust see in it standards andobligations for all mankind. It isnot new ideologies which are neededbut new conditions.

The way history is presented isclosely bound up with politics.Discussion on this subject at thenational level is free and shouldremain so. We who have knownNational-Socialism realize only toowell to what extent officialcensorship can mutilate the. past.All Germans, not only historians,should feel free to have differingopinions on Frederick the Greatand Bismarck, just as Frenchmenshould on Napoleon Bonaparte andNapoleon III.

In this respect, I should like tomention an event which I consider

In the Chamber of Parliament at Bonn, several weeks ago, an impressive cere-mony marked the entry of the German Federal Republic into Unesco. On thisoccasion the Director-General of Unesco journeyed to the German capital

as guest of the Federal Republic and conferred with leading officials, includingPresident Theodor Heuss and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. During his stayin Germany, M. Torres Bodet attended the inaugural meeting the National Com-mission, presided over by Professor Walter Erbe, and met the head of theInternational Institute of Social Sciences which was recently created in Germanyunder Unesco auspices. Before returning to Paris, the Director-General stoppedat two of the most renowned cultural centres in Germany : Beethoven's house inBonn, and Goethe's house in Frankfort. On this page, we publish some of thesalient passages from the addresses delivered at the Chamber of Parliament by

Dr. Heuss and M. Torres Bodet.

particularly significant, and inaccord with Unesco's ideals. Frenchand German history teachersrecently met in Mainz to discussthe events of the last forty or fiftyyears, and the tensions, theproblems and the differences whicharose during this period.

By earnestly seeking to determinethe true facts, they were able toreach joint conclusions concerningthe presentation or such themesas Poincare, the Anschluss andothers in history classes. Teachersof history in both countries havebeen invited to profit from thesefindings and to avoid the traditionalclichés which have been commonin the past. This event shows howdistortions can be eliminated fromaccounts of history when these.distortions are caused by oldpropaganda and misconceptionsinspired by events which aredepasse.

During the war, certain idealsand values which could be appliedlater were not completely aban-doned. Nations, it is true, were atthat time devoting all their effortsto mutual annihilation. But thepeoples-or, at least, the bestcitizens among them-had notcompletely forgotten that we liveside by side with one another, andthrough one another. To ask if itwould be possible one day to livefor one another inevitably meantbeing regarded as a sentimentalist,a Utopian, or even as a traitor.

If it is true that, historicallyspeaking, the word is mightier thanthe sword, then the purposes andmission of Unesco can only be torestore the things of the spirit totheir rightful role and effectiveness.Unesco must help to checkmate thepretensions of power politics,militarism and economic material-ism to decide history's course.

But is it not illusory to speak suchwords at a time when the poolingof European coal production, andthe possibilities of a new type ofarmy seem to be the only questionsthat count ? I am quite aware thatthis is only a gross simplification ofthe fundamental problem of ourtime, but I present this question inas hard and cold a way as possiblepurposely. For even when it appealsto rational arguments, romanticsentimentalism has less effect today

than ever before and has even lesseffect on the Germans than onother peoples.

The answer to this questiondepends on our abilities, on ourwillingness to recognize the presenceof the spiritual and the effectivenessof moral and religious factors whichare the corner stone and veryfoundation of the historicalbackground of individual peoplesand of all humanity.

M. TORRES BODET :'No true culture is

enemy of others'

WHEN it became a Member Stateof Unesco, the German Fe-deral Republic acquired ipso

facto privileges which are alsoduties. It undertook to contributeto the common welfare of humanityaccording to its capacities and in itsown special way.

The talents of your people, thecontribution which your culture canmake-and for centuries you haveshown how valuable these can be- would once more be devoted toserving of our fellow-men.

For every nation, entry intoUnesco means a stock-taking of itsown wealth, and a scrutiny, as itwere, of its own conscience. Itmeans asking what it can drawfrom the resources of its own geniusfor the benefit of its own and othernations.

It also means resolving to fightagainst the fatal temptation, some-times insidious, sometimes insolent,to treat others with contempt, orto make others the means ofattaining a perhaps intoxicatinggreatness, but one which is foundedon the humiliation of others, andtherefore contemptible.

No true culture is the enemy ofother cultures. The greater aculture knows itself to be, the moreit feels called upon to give life toothers by its own contributions,while at the same time esteemingitself all the more capable of assi-milating what other cultures offer.

A great culture is. neither jealousnor timid. It fears neither to give

nor to receive. It is never afraidthat a foreign culture will eclipse it,nor imagines that it can be corruptedby another. It is not exclusive, itis generous.

History teaches us eloquentlyenough that all great cultures areborn at the cross-roads wherecivilizations meet, amid materialand spiritual borrowings, exchanges,and ferment, where the traffic inthings and ideas is at its height.

That is why Unesco fights for thewelfare of all cultures simulta-neously, encouraging them to getto know one another, to makecontacts, and to compete freely withone another. We are convincedthat thereby every one of them willbe enriched and fructified.

A culture is not imposed by forceof arms, nor by the power of money.It is imposed by its own merits, inthe forefront of which is the kindof sympathy it shows towardsothers, and that others can onlyreturn, for sympathy creates sym-pathy no less certainly thancontempt engenders distrust.

The National Commissions ofUnesco have therefore, as their firstduty within the territory of eachMember State, to promote andencourage all measures likely topersuade every citizen to lookbeyond his own frontiers withconfidence and goodwill.

World opinion, however ill-informed, inconsistent, or fickle itmay be, is nevertheless a factorwhich every Government must takeinto account, since it demonstratesmore clearly every day how inter-dependent the different peoples ofthe world really are. There arevery few decisions taken by anyState which are not likely, sooneror later, to have repercussions at theother end of the globe.

Twenty years ago, I visited Beet-hoven's birthplace. The extremesimplicity of this house accordedwell, no doubt, with the memory ofone who had been born, on a dayin December, into a poor home.And no visitor can forget the longtragedy of the life which beganwithin those walls. And yet, I hadnot been prepared for the pathetichumility of that room.

This memory recurred to me formany years, when I thought ofGermany, and has become a kind ofsymbol. After a terrible war, theGerman fatherland, torn andbleeding, looked the embodiment ofwretchedness and isolation.

All its wounds are not yet healed.It still endures divisions andcountless frustrations. But nonation in the world is prevented byits difficulties from stretching outwith all its strength towards thatunique source of hope and peacewhich is international collaborationand the mutual trust of men in thequest for freedom and justice

THE BIRTHPLACE OF BEETHOVEN

"I had not been prepared for the pathetic humility of that room.Around the bust they had arranged a few relics. Near it was asmall window, through which a shaft of sunlight suddenly shone.It played about the head of Beethoven like an aureole and thisradiance transformed the room with its melancholy treasures,and abruptly revealed its secret majesty."These words byM. Torres Bodet evoke the spirit which pervades the house ofBeethoven at Bonn, some views of which are shown here.

MARCH 1952 Page 7-UNESCO COURIER

THE BLIND ARE ACHIEVING A FULLER

ROLE IN EVERYDAY LIFE

A BLIND man is not merely a person deprivedof sight. with all that this implies in thelimitatiòn of his possibilities for action and

inquiry. Socially speaking, he is a creaturesubject to serious constraint. The attitude ofpeople towards blindness in the past was alwayssurrounded by an aura of fear or mystery. Thisis revealed in their treatment of the blind.

In primitive societies, the blind were held tobe possessed ; and if their lives were sometimesspared, it was because people feared the spiritsdwelling in them. The Laws of Manu authorizedthe killing of infants born blind and relegated tothe ranks of the outcasts those smitten withblindness later in life. In Ancient Rome, the cur-rent of opinion which tempered the dreadprerogatives of the paterfamilias never went sofar as to condemn the practice of abandoningchildren born with an infirmity. In the old Bibli-cal days, blindness was considered an uncleanness :"Blind, or broken, or maimed, or having a wen,or scurvy, or scabbed, ye shall not offer theseunto the Lord..." (Leviticus, XXII, 22) ;"... a blindman, or a lame,... shall not come nigh to offerthe offerings of the Lord" (id., XXI, 18). Thepractice of blinding princes to prevent them fromacceding to the throne, which still prevailed atthe Persian Court as late as the 17th century,was conceived less as a punishment than as ameans of branding them with a mark of infirmity.

T'if blind ceased to be outcasts when the Gospelmade them (and ai'so deaf-mutes and thedead) the subject of miracles and proof of

Divine healing power. Mediæval Christianityand Islam accorded them the status of privileged

by Pierre HE. NRIProfessor at the Institute for the

Young Blind, Paris.

beggars ; and on occasions they served as inter-cessors with the Divinity and read the Lord'sprayers or. recited the verses of the Koran. Never-theless, their position in society remained pre-carious and degrading.

A certain degree of progress has been achievedin modern society. For the past 250 years menhave made an effort to understand the psychologyof the sightless, beginning with William Moly-neux, the English physicist, who early in the 18thcentury first put the famous question to JohnLocke : would a man who was born blind andwho later gained his sight be able to distinguish acube from a sphere ? And for the past 170 years,attention has been given to the systematic educa-tion of the blind. In spite of this, the attitudeof sighted people towards blindness remainedcoloured by many fictions derived not fromexternal experience-that is, from direct observa-tion of the blind-but from subjective andlargely emotional sentiments. To a seeing man,any understanding of or influence upon the outerworld seems impossible without sight. When aperson closes his eyes in an attempt to realizewhat a blind man may think and feel, his mind,emptied of all visual impressions, is invaded bythe terrors which beset primitive man in thedark. Those who can see are too afraid of blind-ness to be able to understand it. Here, indeed,is the chief obstacle to the natural assimilationof the abnormality which the blind man repre-sents in the social organism.

From this it is clear that the emancipation ofthe blind has depended and will always dependon progress in understanding by those who cansee. So long a's sighted people fail to free theirminds of the subjective and emotional factorswhich so strongly colour their ideas of blindness,so long will the efforts of the sightless to shakeon'their burden of infirmity be doomed to failure.

NEVERTHELESS, whatever may he said by thosewho have suffered from what they some-what bitterly call social prejudices, these do

not represent the only chain which the blind mustbreak. Blindness is a fact. It narrows down spacevery considerably and limits a man's mastery ofthe material objects in space. The biologicalfunction of sight is to anticipate and avoid painand danger. Nature is hostile to any creatureincapable of reaction at a distance. Had all menbeen blind, mankind could not possibly havesurvived the dangers which threatened it. Theworld, with all the things which men havedeveloped for their use, such as houses,communications, tools and books, has beenorganized by those who can see, and for them.The blind man thus meets life with a gravehandicap. How can he possibly overcome itexcept by cultivating and making the fullestpossible use of the faculties he retains ?

The first idea that comes to mind is that theblind person should develop those of his senseshe can still use, particularly hearing and touch.

(Continued on next page)

Towards an equal footing

with the sighted

(Continued from previous page)

One hundred and fifty years of associationist psy-chology held to the theory of sensory transfer.We know now that education of the senses is infact education through the senses, and that alltransfer is essentially of a mental kind. Forexample, it is the mind which organizes fragment-ary data acquired analytically by the sense oftouch, and gradually builds up a series of spatialimages. These, though lacking the richness,spontaneity and potential emotional content ofvisual images, are enough to meet the practicalneeds nf the h) ind. That such images do existeven in the brain of the congenitallyblind can no langer be doubted. Dio-genes demonstrated movement bywalking ; people born blind comeand go about their business andsolve geometrical problems whichproves that their minds are capable ofconceiving space and shape. But itis equally true that the number, thequality and the practical value ofthese mental images depend on ade-quate training. Without such train-ing, a blind child cannot overcome hisimtial handicap. This is a point tobear in mind in any discussion con-cerning the emancipation of the blindthrough education and culture. Weshat return to the point in a moment.

FIRST consider another aspect ofthe problem. While the blindman is handicapped by the loss

of one of his'senses and must findways to compensate for this, he can atall times express his ideas through thespoken language.

1, 000 blind students were enrolled at a t l\elogicalseminary in Egypt preparing to teach and commenton the Koran. Taha Hussein Pasha, formerlyMinister of Education in Egypt and rector of theFarouk I University, began his successful career inthis way. Though blind, he has risen to be one ofthe leading educational reformers of his country.Endowed with a great memory, he has people toread to him and dictates his own writings, so that hehas never found it necessary to learn Braille.He has already published a formidable body ofworks : 20 volumes of criticism and essays, half-a-dozen novels, translations of Sophocles andRacine into Arabic, and a fa'scinating autobiography,

In fact, long before there was anythought of creating special schools for the sight-less,. blind persons often astounded their seeingcontemporaries with the scope and quality of theirlearning. Many are the blind who have achievedfame. We need not dwell on those whose blind-ness is considered legendary or otherwise disputed(such as Oedipus, Democritus, Homer, Ossian), orthose who lost their sight late in life and thereforeoffer less conclusive evidence. It is noteworthythat as early as the 14th century, an Arab scholarnamed Safadi published the biography of 307 dis-tinguished blind Moslems. In Japan, blind scholarshad their own academic institutions for many years,in which they transmitted the traditions andhistory of their country. Blind persons in Japanalso held a practical monopoly of massage andother healing practices.

In civilizations where a formalized culture ishanded down by memory, and where teaching isalmost entirely by word of mouth, a blind personwith a good memory is almost on an equal footingwith those who can see. Not so long ago, over

Book of Drays. which is not only a somewhatsatirical account of the training given at El-Azhar50 years ago, but also an invaluable document onthe psychology of the blind.

No instances of formal education for the blind areto be found either in Greek or Roman times, or inmediaeval Christendom. On rare occasions, thegreatly gifted found their way to fame : Didymus ofAlexandria became the teacher of Saint Jerome inthe fourth century ; Palladius, one of the pupils ofDidymus, later became bishop of a see in AsiaMinor ; Joannes Ferdinand, born in Bruges in the15th century, acquired fame as a philosopher, poetand orator ; Pierre Pontanus, known as the"blindman of Bruges"early in the 16th century, lefttreatises on the art of writing poetry, and spoke outfearlessly on the social problems of his day. Otherblind scholars, philosophers, theologians andwriters appeared in Italy, England, and other coun-tries, leaving a permanent mark in their specialities.

By the 18th century, the number of sightlesswhose achievements astounded the whole world

rose sharpl. History has recorded many of theirnames : Elizabeth of Wa) dkireh in Switzerland,Mélanie de Salignac in France, Maria von Paradi.-in Austria, and Nicotas Saunderson in England.'It was Diderot, in his famous Letter on the Blindwho first drew the world's attention to the workof this extraordinary. man. Blinded at the ageof one following an attack of smallpox, Saundersonhad a painstaking mentor in his father. Whenhe attended school his lightning mental calculationsastonished hi, s teachers. He was a brilliant studentof Latin, Greek and mathematics. Before Saunder-son was 30, he was appointed to the Lucasian Chairof mathematics at Cambridge University, and he

was one of the rare persons In l ! ; nglanawho cou ! d exp) ain Newton's Principin.His students were filled with admira-tion at his lectures on optic's and hisexplanations on the rainbow, the na-ture of colours, reflection, refraction: mud vision. Lord Chesterfield laterralled him the miracle of a man wholost the use of his own sight andtaught others to use theirs. To aidhis remarkable memory and compli-cated mathematical demonstrations, he'invented the arithmetical board whichis the basi's of today's mathematicalequipment for the blind.

This is a significant point. Mostblind people during this period foundit necessary to use or to devise forthemselves many kinds of mechanical,aids to learning. Cut-out letters,writing guides, relief surface maps,musical notations on a projectingslave, were all used. One blind per-son, living in Hesse, Germany, evenbuilt up for himself a huge series ofideographs consisting of little pieces,of wood of different shapes and sizes.

It was, in fact, the advance made ineducational techniques that laid thefoundation for the efforts to teach

them to read late in the 18th and early in the 19thcenturies. Had teaching continued to be mainlyby word of mouth, and the development of printingnot made the book rather than the teacher thechief source of reference, Valentin Hauy mightnever have thought of giving his pupils his enor-mous quarto volumes with their pages covered withordinary letters embossed in large type. And,40 years later, Louis Braille might have devotedless care and thought to converting the meagresystem of sound symbols which his predecessor,Charles Barbier, had suggested for the use of theblind, into an alphabet capable of adaptation toevery language and every form of human know-.ledge.

In the history of the rehabilitation of the blindand of their gradual attainment of fundamentalhuman rights, the invention of the alphabet in rais-ed dots marks the beginning of the era of theirintellectual emancipation. Since then, blind chil-dren have been able to'study the same schoolsubjects as the sighted. Their programmes of

Britain's famous training centre for the blind, founded after World War I, follows a careful plan for rehabilitation.Newcomer first gets Braille watch-a small but vital step to independence. Then he learns to be blind." (1) Heista'jghttoread Braiiieandtotype. instructor is himself blind. (2) After learning to walk, wash, dress, St. Duns-taners learn to enjoy their recreation (here a game of darts). (3) Next comes specialized instruction. This blindman has been trained as a physiotherapist. (4) High skill of blind workers makes unemployment unlikely forSt. Dunstan"graduates."These men are checking machine parts to very fine limits. (5) Many are trained astelephone operators. A number of firms have for many years asked St. Dunstan's to fill every suitable vacancy.

THE ST. DUNSTAN'S

TRAINING CENTRE

Instead of almost invariably being a burden on their relatives, as the sightless wereat one time, blind people now are often well-equipped to lead useful and happy lives.

expressions, dress, the setting of his existence andwhich, while he may retain his own share ofindividuality, develops in him a resemblance to hisfellows. The potential for developing the.'economicman"is found in the opportunities for productiveand creative work or at least in the training forit which sight makes possible.

The blind person, however, is restricted to theboundaries of his own world which he mustpatiently explore and chart. First he must learnhow to appear like other people ; he must pain-fully acquire all the substitute skills that may helphim to bridge the tremendous initial gap betweenhis natural abilities and those of a sighted person,and, in addition, he must overcome emotionaldisturbances which so often spring from hisdisability. From this we can see what"education"and"culture"signify to the blind and to whatextent the ground to be covered goes beyond whatare generally called the mental faculties.

A hundred years ago it was a great achievementto be able to teach a sightless person how to read,write, count and to provide him with a minimumof general knowledge. Today it means very little.This is something which should never be forgottenby those who work to free the blind from ignorancein the unhappily numerous areas of the worldwhere educational opportunities are still extremelylimited.

It should be recognized, however, that whileculture, of a strictly intellectual order, may notsuffice alone, it is an indispensable condition, forthe substitution of one faculty for another isprimarily a mental process. Moreover, where asighted person understands and acts quickly andwithout effort, because he can take in all the factorsinvoved in deciding his action, the blind man mustgo through slower processes of inference andcalculation.

The skill with which a blind man finds his wayabout a city, the capabilities of the sightless"oddjob"man or worker, the blind woman who notonly copes. with all her domestic duties, but, quiteunaided, makes herself a becoming dress-here are

examples of how acquired knowledge may be put touse. When competing with those who can see, theblind can only hope for success through excellingin some respect. Even to obtain a modest positionhe must possess qualifications not generally requir-ed for the post. It is therefore not unusual to findblind university graduates working as telephoni'sts,shorthand-typists and in other jobs which by nomeans call fur the full use of their capabitities.

IN this article, we have had in mind chiefly theblind since childhood, although not becausethere are more of them-two-thirds of the

blind are over 50 years old-but because theirsituation sets them more sharply apart. We havesaid nothing of Milton, Euler, Augustin Thierry,Henry Fawcett, Handel or countless other poets,scientists, scholars and artists who have contmuedtheir careers despite loss of sight. Their brainscontinued their work ; others became their eyes.Probably the most striking instance is that of Fran-çois Hubert, the Swiss naturalist who impressedhis contemporaries in the late 18th century withhis observations on bees-observations madethrough. the eyes of his servant.

Today many blinded people continue successfulcareers in journalism, documentation services,teaching and scientific research, with the help ofsomeone else's eyes.

There is no doubt that blind people have foundin the intellectual or aesthetic sphere, a means ofsublimating instinctive energies whose naturaloutlet has been barred, and that they have soughtcompensation in their pursuit of culture in all the,forms and at all the levels they can reach. Wehave shown that the world of the intellect remainsopen to them, and it is natural that they should takerefuge there, even if, for some of them, it means acertain overstraining of their natural aptitude

(he. Pierre llenri, ! I'ho is himself blind, has published InFrench the life 01'the Blind and Tile Life and work ofLouis Braille.)

C IVILTZATION ran no longer be cmtent merelywith homo sapiens ; it needs man with a socialconscience, and homo economics, as Léon

Jouhaux has called him. Formal education maylead to a development of the first of these, but itplays only a small part in the formttion of theother two. In a sighted person, social consciousnessderives from a spontaneous imitation cf everythinghe sees around him, which determines his gestures,

study are the same though the method : of teachingare different, and they receive the stme degrees.Special libraries have slowly been buit up, mostlyby voluntary efforts, in which the adult blind canfind entertaining and instructive literatures, whilescores in Braille notation are published to enableblind musicians to study and practise their art aswell as teach it.

In the less developed countries, wel'are work toimprove the lot of the blind sometimes results,paradoxically, in educating people wto, had theybeen able to see, would have remained illiterate,Education then is regarded as he primarycondition for the emancipation of the blind. Butis education enough by itself ? Can ; ve say that,where the blind have attained a certain standardof education, they are automatically fr'ed from thepsychological and social constraints imposed bytheir blindness ?

It would be wrong to believe this or to allow theblind to do so. They need more than lnowledge oruniversity degrees if they are to have equalchances in the world of those who car see. Thereare plenty of examples where education, whichshould have opened a door to freedom :'or the blind,has merely stimulated the"malady of thought."Having more to think of, they suIered more.Spurred on by a strong desire to be compensatedfor their disability or ill-advised by those aroundthem, the people we have in mind took up studieswhich never helped them to make their way inthe world.

UNESCO COURIER-Page 10 MARCH t952

LOUIS BRAILLE

unlocked the doors of darkness for millions

of blind men and women throughout the world

LOUIS BRAILLE, one of the truly great ment of alt time, died a hundred years ago,unknown to the world. But his simple"touch"alphabet of raised dots for read-

ing and writing by the blind-developedwhen he was only 16-has since spread hisname to every corner of the earth and unlockedthe once hopeless doors of darkness for mil-lions of the world's sightless.

"Braille died a complete human being,though blind,"Helen Keller has written."Hewas great because he had greatly used his lossof sight to liberate his afflicted fellow creatures.He had both lived and died in theglorious light of a victorious spiritand a brilliant, inventive intellect."

This summer, to honour thisvictorious spirit and inventive in-tellect, the French Government istransferring the remains of LouisBraille from his humble tomb inthe village of Coupvray, 23 milesfrom the capital, to the Panthéonin Paris, where he will be buriedamong his country's illustrious dead.In many other nations, too, the100th anniversary of his death isbeing observed this year.

The son of a saddler, Braille wasborn at Coupvray on January 4.1809, At the age of three he losthis sight when a sharp instrumenthe was playing with in his father'sshop accidentally entered his eye.An infection developed in both eyesand he became totally blind. WhenLouis was 10, he was taken to Parisand was enrolled in the Institutefor the Young Blind. It was at thisschool-the first educational insti-tution for the blind, opened 35 yearsearlier by Valentin Hairy-thatBraille distinguished himself as itbrilliant student and then became ateacher of geometry and algebra(his favourite subjects) as well as ofmusic. It was here that he learnedof t. he various raised characters usedto help the blind to read, and herehe finally evolved his own ingenioussystem of dots.

Braille was not, however, by anymeans the first to develop the systemof raised characters. The desire ofthe blind for literacy and the effortsof their sighted friends to open theway for them, had led to innumer-able experiments in embossed lettersand other schemes for many hun-dreds of years before Braille's time.

Letters cut out of paper, pins stuckinto cushions or cards, geometricalshapes enclosing raised dots, evencleverly knotted strings were allused in early attempts.

The first records of the actual useof raised type for the blind datefrom iûth century Spain and Italy.Francisco Lucas of Saragossa, in1571, devised a set of letters carvedon thin tablets of wood. In 157 ;),Rampazetto of Rome improved thissomewhat.

Both methods, however, seem tohave been inspired by the earlierteachings and writings of JeronlPCardan, of Italy, who had advocateda system of reading by touch aboutthe year 1550.

A century later, a Jesuit priest.FAtnpT'Ii'T'An/"p< :/,, () T. AnA T'p/" {) Q'ni7pn-----.-----------------,---- ('------a new idea that Braille and his immediatepredecessor, Captain Barbier, were to developlater : the potential usefulness of a cipher codebased on a number of dots enclosed in rect-angles. In his book Prodrome. he evenproposed a'writing stylus and a woodenwriting frame with strings to indicate the lines.

Then followed a great number of inventorswho proposed various devices, including the useof wooden movable letters, cast metal letters,printing on copper. Of these attempts at em-bossed type, undoubtedly the best known is thatof Valentin Hazy, who has been called the"Father and Apostle of the Blind."

In 1771, Valentin Haüy saw a group of blindmen being hooted and laughed at by a crowd ata Paris fair on the place Louis-) e-Grand-to-day the place Yendòme. Horrified, he deter-

mined to devote his life to improving the lot ofthe sightless.

One day, some time afterwards, he found ablind boy begging in front of the Church of St-Germain-des-Pres in Paris and decided to takehim home with him to try and educate him.Haüy taught the boy, whose name was Lesueur,to read with letters carved on wooden tablets-similar to the method introduced by Lucas andRampazetto, It was slow, cumbersome anddifficult.

Then by accident to the story goes), whenHaüy was busy writing one afternoon, Lesueur

'ONE OF THE TRULY GREAT MEN OF ALL TIME'

In the village square at Coupvray, birthplace of Louis Braille, stands themonument erected in his memory in 1887, thirty-five years after he had diedunknown. On one side of the seven-foot pedestal a bronze relief showsBraille teaching a blind child how to read ; on the other is the Braille alphabet.

began sorting some papers on his desh. Sud-denly the boy came across an invitation cardprinted in heavily embossed relief letters andfound he could recognize some of the letters.

This gave Haüy the idea that teaching theblind to read by raised letters on printed card-board (embossed letters) was better than usingraised type or tablets directly.

Pierre Henri, an authority on Louis Brailleand his predecessors, doubts this story."I aminclined to wonder,"he has written."whetherhe did not get the idea from an addendum tothe 1783 edition of the LeUf'/'011 the Blind, inwhich Diderot told how a Paris printer namedPral1lt had produced a book printed in relief forthe use of a distinguished blind girl, Mile de:- ; alignac."

In any event, whatever really inspired Hazy,

effort to meet these difficulties.None of these embossed type

methods survives today except Moontype. Invented by a blind English-man, Dr. William Moon, this waystill fills the special needs of olderpeople whose touch is not goodenough to read Braille's raised dots.

The revolutionary idea of re-presenting letters by raised dots didnot come from Louis Braille, how-ever, but from Charles Barbier de laSerre, a French Army officer in theSignal Corps. Barbier devised asystem of"night writing"forsoldiers to communicate with oneanother in the field after dark.

He then thought of applying it tothe blind and presented his systemto the Institute for the Young Blindin Paris. Barbier's night writinghad 12 dots arranged in various posi-tions and could be punched on topaper. The Institute tried it outand adopted it as a supplementaryteaching method.

But Barbier's system was compli-cated. It occupied too much spaceand was cumbersome for fingers ;also it had to be deciphered, sinceit was a code and not an alphabet.

Braille, a master in the Instituteat the time, became interested in theidea. As a teacher, he saw its draw-backs for spending and punctuation.But the system could at least bewritten since Barbier had also devis-ed the metal frame for punchingthe dots on paper. He set to workto try to simplify it and make itmore easily usable by the fingers ofa blind man.

He reduced the 12-dot squares tosix. The six dots could be felt bythe finger tip at one go. Droppingthe idea of ciphers, Braille decidedto work out various combinations ofthe dots to form the alphabet. Hearranged the six dots in three pairs,one above the other, as in a domino.

"It has been said,"Pierre Henriwrote,"that the reason why LouisBraille's system has proved superiorto all other forms of writing for theblind is that it bore the stamp ofgenius. To put it more simply, itresults from a combination of skillwith patient and methodical labour.Only a blind man could have ar-ranged dots in groups which exactlycorrespond to the requirements ofthe sense of touch. Reduce thenumber of dots, and the availablesigns become obviously insufficient ;add to their number, and the signcan no longer be covered by thefinger tip, nor so easily read.

"Braille did not rest content withgiving an alphabet to the blind. From theoutset, by allotting double or triple values toeach sign, he presented a system of musicalnotation, a set of elementary mathematicalsymbols, and a system of shorthand so that theblind could satisfy not only their desire forculture, but also their professional needs."

Braille died on January W, 1852 with no ideathat his system would be universally adoptedby blind people in every part of the world.Even in his own school he had great difficultyin getting his method recognized and used.Only after his death was it officially adopted inFrench schools for the blind.

Today, without the Braille system, the world's7, 000, 000 sightless would be deprived of themost powerful key to human freedom andscholarship ever devised for the blind.

it was with this new method that he decided totry to teach other blind children. In it8/1, heopened the world's first school for blind chil-dren-the Institute for Young Blind, whichLouis Braille was to enter : 3 ;) years afterwards- and by the end of its first year it put the firstembossed books at the finger tips of the blind.His Institute is still in existence today inParis.

Hauy's system, however, remained difficultto read by touch, and practically impossible to

write. Changes and improvements were con-stantly being made in different countries in an

MARCH 1952 Page I I-UNESCO COURIER

BETWEEN the time the Institute forthe Young Blind of Paris originallypublished louis Braille's system of

simple raised dots in 1829, and the re-quest made to Unesco in 1949 to helprationalize the Babel in Braille usage inmany parts of the world, 120 years haveelapsed.

The first 50 years witnessed a stubborn,last-ditch battle by conservative groups tomaintain the old forms of embossing.Then came 70 years during which the ori-ginal Braille method had to competewith modified and reconstructed forms ofitself.

Almost from the start, enthusiasts ofthe Braille idea in many. countries beganjuggling the dots around in different com-binations. Soon the same patterns of sixdots came to be used to express differentletters not only in different languages buteven in the same language.For over 70 years, on both sides of the

Atlantic, a virtual civil war was foughtbetween the numerous adaptations ofBraille, with the blind themselves some-times forgotten in the din.

In Great Britain, for example, the Biblehad already been printd in no fewer thanfive systems by 1868. In the same year,Dr. Thomas R. Armitage, together with agroup of other blind men, founded theBritish and Foreign Blind Association(now the National Institute for the Blind)which was to play an important role inprinting and disseminating Braille booksand furthering the cause of Braillethroughout the world. After a study ofthe various British types, the groupdecided in favour of the original Braille.

In the United States, three arrangementscame into use. One group adopted FrenchBraille, as Britain had done. Anothermodified many of the signs on the prin-ciple of the fewest dots to the most fre-quently recurring letters. A third groupturned the axis of the Braille rectanglefrom the vertical to the horizontal.

All three systems had their virtues, butthey created a situation similar to thatwhich would exist if one third of sightedAmericans today spelt Washiltgton in theordinary English way ; another third speltit Pxftwqsaq ; and the remainder like this :- : :...,.,'",,' IS- : :"

In 1918, after a committee had workedfor 15 years, unity was restored with thedecision to return to the original FrenchBraille. Only in 1932 did an agreementbetween the United Kingdom and theUnited States fix"Standard EnglishBraille"as the contracted or abbreviatedform for everyday use throughout theEnglish-speaking world.

Similar divergent systems introdueed inGerman, modern Greek and HebrewBrailles also yielded in due time to areturn to the original French.

But there are many scores of major lan-guages and dialects in the world. Varia-tions existed in Braille used in Spain andPortugal and the different Latin Americancountries. Because of the added factor ofvaried scripts and the absence of anyrecognized symbols for letter-sounds notused in the Latin alphabet, Asian andAfrican language Braille systems have beeneven more erratic in those parts of theworld.

Throughout the later 1940s, movementstowards the establishment of single Braillesystems gained momentum. Governmentsbegan to consider linking the educationof the blind with their wider educationalprogrammes and discovered for themselvesthe chaotic state of Braille adaptations.

These were the circumstances which inApril 1949 led Dr. Humayun Kabir, JointSecretary for Education of the Govern-ment of India, to write to the Director-General of Unesco to ask whether it wouldbe possible for Unesco to take up thequestion of a single universal script forthe blind.

The Government of India was alreadyworking hard to bring about some formof unified Braille script for the manydifferent languages used by its vast pops.lation.

"In India,"Dr. Kabir wrote,"with itsten or eleven major languages, the pro-blem of different Braille scripts has beenone of the main obstacles to the provisionof larger facilities for the education ofthe blind... The fact that scripts differfrom country to country has prevented theproduction of literature in Braille on asufficiently large scale and thus added tothe cost of an already expensive process."

Soon after receiving Dr. Kabir's letter,Unesco's Executive Board accepted thetask, recognizing that this was a worldproblem which came within the scope ofUnesco.

But such a world problem called forthe help of the best specialists. Unescomade a survey, and chose Sir CluthaMackenzie as its consultant to"study theworld Braille situation as it stands, and toadvise Unesco on Braille systems."SirClutha, a New Zealander who lost his sightin the Gallipoli campaign in 1915, hadbecome one of the most eminent expertsin Braille.

At Unesco's General Conference in 1949,the Director-General was instructed"toorganize an international conference witha view to agreeing on certain internationalprinciples which would allow the greatestdegree of uniformity in Braille and wouldimprove its rationalization and develop itsextension."

Leading experts from a number ofcountries, including eminent blind leaders

and teachers of the blind, met in Paris inDecember 1949 as an advisory committee.Among those present were Professor PierreHenri of France, Mr. John Jarvis of theUnited Kingdom, Professor Suniti KumarChatterji of India, Captain ShahriBekhradnia of Persia, Professor NikolaBassili of Egypt, and Miss MarjorieHooper of the United States.

The discussion led to unanimousagreement on a fundamental objective : asingle Braille system should be workedout, in which each sign would be usedfor the same or nearly the same sound 8Sin the original Braille, and wouldrepresent the same letter or fulfil thesame or a similar function.

This paved the way for the Interna-tional Braille Conference in March 1950.It was one of the ; :, :,-. t representativegatherings of specialists in problems ofwriting for the blind ever broughttogether in a single place and for acommon purpose.

The 21 delegates, 11 of them blind,represented the sightless in India, Pakis-tan, Egypt, Malaya, Argentina, Ceylon, theUnited Kingdom, Hashemite Jordan,France, Greece, the United States, China,Brazil and Japan. The famous blind-mute American woman, Helen Keller,attended one of the sessions, and spokeof the work of the meeting as a historicmilestone in the history of the blind.

She was riot exaggerating. For theresult of the meeting was to bring blindreaders of all languages closer than seeingreaders to a single script for the wholeworld. The delegates decided that itwas both desirable and practicable tocreate a broadly uniform Braille systemfor all languages and scripts. This wouldbe known as World Braille.

In it, a single symbol would be pro-vided for each visual letter. The soundvalue of the symbol would be identicalwith that of the visual letter of the alpha-bet of the particular language. Thus,World Braille would be a completetactile representation of visual scripts.This would mean a close degree of Uni-formity in each language group, and a themaximum degree of consistency amongthe various Braille systems.

The Conference succeeded in taking anumber of practical and concrete stepstoward creating World Braille. One wasagreement that Braille should readalways from left to right. Represen-tatives of the Perso·Arabic languagesspoken in Hashemite Jordan, Egypt, Per-sia, Pakistan, Iraq and Malaya decided tosuggest to all countries in their linguisticgroup that the method of reading fromright to left be abandoned. A spokesmanfor modern Hebrew concurred in therecommendation.

Another achievement was an agreementon uniform Chinese Braille based onMandarin, but keeping a degree of soundrelationship with the traditional Braille,Still other agreements were to recommendthat mathematical and chemical symbolsbe represented more uniformly throughoutthe world ; that uniformity be restoredand maintained in punctuation signs ; andthat the degree of uniformity be extendedin musical notation.

Many formidable obstacles arising fromBraille codes built on traditional practicesin visual scripts tied to historical, reli-gious and sentimental backgrounds wereovercome. Spokesmen for various groupsof Braille readers expressed, in the nameof uniformity, a willingness to sacrificethat which had already been learned andto begin all over again.

Although a truly phonetic WorldBraille was not yet deemed practicablefor general purposes, the Conferencesuggested the creation of a panel ofexperts to suggest ways of extending theuse of existing phonetic notations. An-other panel would work out an interna-tional classification of sounds of lettersand tone marks.

Unesco's General Conference at Flo-rence in 1950 took further practical stepstoward Braille rationalization. It decidedto compile a World Braille chart ; tofoster the publication of a reference bookon uniformity ; and to help establish aWorld Braille Council.

Bit by bit, th. rough hard and consistentefforts of experts under Unesco's auspices,the obstacles were gradually removed. Astudy of the linking of Braille symbolswith those of the International PhoneticAssociation was made. A meeting washeld in London of a committee of expertson the uniform adaptation of Braille toAfrican tribal languages.

In February 1951 a regional conferencetook place in Beirut, Lebanon, devoted tothe problems of Braille uniformity in thelanguages of the Middle East, India andSouth-East Asia. In November last, asecond regional meeting was held, inMontevideo, on reducing the differencesamong the various Braille methods in usein the Spanish and Portuguese languages.Thus, most of the ground work was done.

Finally, Unesco convened a meeting lastDecember in Paris of representatives ofthe various linguistic areas, and of thedifferent Braille committees and pub-lishers, to form a consultative committeefor the creation of the World BrailleCouncil, to be set up this year. Itwill be a world agency, centralizing andhelping through expert advice in thework of rationalizing all varieties ofBraille into a single universal script forche blind.

UNESCO COURIER-Page 12 MARCH 1952

THE INTERDEPENDENCE

OR CIVILIZATION

by Professor hands KOHN

INDIVIDUALS grow and develop, spiritually and morally,by contact. The same holds true of nations andcivilizations. In the primitive stage peoples live as

strictly separated entities. They jealously guard their"own"civilization, their"original"traditions, protectingthem from"alien"influences. But with the progress ofhistory barriers give way to a growing cross-fertilizationof civilizations ; meeting the challenge of other culturesthey diversify their own and liberate it from limitingshackles by assimilating and adapting outside influences,often in a complex give-and-take process. The more inthe open society grows, the further it advances towardsunity of mankind.

Buddhism in its vitality spread its message to Chinaand Tibet, to Japan and Thailand, to Ceylon and Bali,everywhere vivifying and transforming the native civiliza-tions and permeating them with the same attitudes.Even more penetrating was the spread of Greekcivilization after Alexander the Great, who in his briefcareer was inspired by the hope of uniting the peoplesof the earth in a new peaceful order based upon thecommunity of civilization. He bade Greeks and barba-rians, as Plutarch wrote,"to consider as their fatherlandthe whole inhabited earth, and as akin to them all goodmen."The Stoics developed this attitude into aphilosophy, and the Romans made the spread of auniform civilization throughout the then-known worldpossible. This civilization was no longer Greek ; it hadabsorbed Oriental and Roman elements, with a newemphasis upon humanitas, the human quality in everyman and the essential oneness of mankind. This cross-fertilization of civilizations made the spread ofChristianity, and later of Islam, possible. The latter,originally the creed of desert Arabs, became a Worldfactor by assimilating Greek and Persian civilizations.

THE flowering of Christianity in the High MiddleAges, with its universities, poetry and chivalry, wasan outgrowth of its closer contacts with the world

of Islam. Arab philosophy transmitted to the West thewisdom of Greece ; the court of Frederick II in Sicily,who admired Mohammedan civilization for the greaterfreedom of its intellectual atmosphere, showed the firstsymptoms of modern government ; the Crusaders broughthome from the Levant sometimes a deep respect for thewealth and form of the alien civilization which they foundthere. It was this very recognition of the interdependenceof civilization and the willingness to become open to theinfluence of alien cultures which made the great advanceof the West possible. It was the increasing withdrawalfrom open contact and intercourse which weakened Islamand Eastern Christianity. Around the year 1000 theleadership had been theirs, by 1500 it had definitelyshifted to the West.

In the following five hundred years this leadershipbecame more pronounced by the growing eagerness toexplore other civilizations, to become enriched by thiscontact, and to visualize the world more and more as anopen society in which the intercourse of ideas and theflow of goods should be untrammelled and continuous.It began with the fifteenth century, when Westernscholars eagerly learned from the Greeks who had leftConstantinople after its fall to the Turks ; it found aclimax in the eighteenth century, when Far Easternwisdom and art was joyfully and respectfully received inthe West, and its intellectuals turned to the newlydiscovered"primitive"civilizations for inspiration. Nordid Western civilization tend to dissociate into closedentities proud of their.'originality."Educated menfound their cultural fulfilment in Latin or French, andscholars and diplomats could meet in understandingwithout the help of translators. The great achievementof the West, the recognition of individual liberty andfree inquiry, was due to the interplay and inter-dependence of the Low Countries-where Grotius,Descartes and Locke wrote, and where Pierre Bayle

launched in 1684 his Nouvelles de fa République des

Lettres-and England, with its Puritan and Gloriousrevolutions, of the Anglo-Americans in the virgin landsacross the Atlantic, and of France, where the Englishconcepts of the rights of the individual and thelimitations of government were transformed into auniversal message for every man and citizen.

Germany's greatest writer, Goethe, stressed always thisinterdependence of civilization. He acknowledged hisdeep indebtedness to"alien"cultures which to him werepart of the one great patrimony ; he had hardly anysympathy for, or interest in, the German struggle of histime for"liberation"from the French"invader."Inhis old age he expressed his admiration for Frenchculture, and he created the term Weltliteratur, worldliterature, as a meeting ground for the good in all civili-zations and the nursery for the writers in all tongues.He did not confine himself to the West, though inmany ways he was one of the representative men ofWestern civilization ; his most mature poems were

influenced by his reading of translations from Persianand Arabic authors and especially the West-EasternDivan, where these celebrated lines can be found :

Gottes ist der Orient ! God's own is the Orient !Gottes ist der Okzident ! God's own) is the Occident !Nord-und südl/ches Gefande, Northern and southern lands,Ruht im Frieden selner Rest peacefully in His hands.

[Hande.

The other great Germans of his time, Kant andBeethoven, Lessing and Schiller, were equally devoid ofany national exclusiveness. But only a few years latera new emphasis was placed on the"originality"anduniqueness of national civilizations, on the differences ofcultures ; the more distinct culture became faithful to its.'own"origins and past and unaffected by"alien"influences, the more it was thought to be creative. Thiscultural self-sufficiency was also applied to the politicalfield in the stress of undiminished national sovereignty,and to economic relations, in which national frontiersbecame ever mounting barriers. In his Der geschlosseneHandelsstaat, the German philosopher J. G. Fichtesuggested the creation of an ideal society in completeisolation from the rest of the world so that, by as littlecontact as possible with foreigners, it might develop itsnational character to the highest degree. While it wouldclose its frontiers to all commercial exchange withforeign lands-thus establishing its own state as agreat common work house guaranteeing work to everycitizen-he at least exempted scholarship from thisextreme isolationism. Whatever belongs to the citizen,

The Concept of Man and the Philosophy of Educationin East and West. This was the theme of an inter-national symposium attended by philosophers, human-

ists. and educators in New Delhi recently. The sympo-sium, held by Unesco and the Indian Government, studiedthis question for one week. Divergencies, of course, arosebut mainly it was found that they did not stem from funda-mental differences in attitude between the East and West.The symposium reached general agreement on a numberof basic ideas. Among these we note the following : 1) Thedifference between East and West has been over-emphasizedin popular thought. 2) The East is by no means synonymouswith India. 3) Certain differences due to geography, climateand similar factors must always remain and cannot be chang-ed. 4) Even so, the typical attitudes of Eastern and Westernman are products of evolution and could be modified, withtime, by cultural contacts. 5) Such contacts are now possibleon a scale unknown before and must be promoted by everymeans available. 6) Wars and world conflicts have notarisen from differences of civilization such as are repres-ented by East and West, but between the uncivilized andfanatical minoritieswithinasingle civilization. It is to elimin-ate such uncivilized minorities by means of educationthat East and West might co-operate. 7) The teaching ofscience should be more closely related with philosophyteaching so that scientific work can go hand in hand with

'., Qgnition of its impact on man and society. The inter-:'_.. Jence of all civilizations-a fact strongly borne outi the symposium-is discussed by Dr. Hans Kohn, Pro-fessor of History at the College of the City of New York,

in the stimulating article published on this page.

he wrote, is under the control of the state, butscholarship belongs to man and not to a citizen. Inthe twentieth century this distinction was given up insome cases of proclaimed self-sufnciency.

The nineteenth century, however, took on the wholea different course. Society became more and more anopen market place of ideas and goods. Cobden andBright spread fervently the gospel of free trade, notonly as an economic doctrine but as a means to build theinterdependence of mankind in peaceful dependence :"In place of the old local and national institution andself-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction,universal interdependence of all nations. And as inmaterial, so also in intellectual production. The intellec-tual creations of individual nations become commonproperty. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindednessbecome more and more impossible, and from thenumerous national and local literatures there arises aworld literature."

This fertilization by interdependence enriched thecivilizations which tore down the walls separating them.Peter the Great broke a first window in the wall whichOrthodox Russia had erected in an attempt to isolateherself from Europe. A century later, a more openintercourse between the two civilizations slowly beganto emerge, though it continued to be hampered byprohibitive passport regulations and the fear of contactpredominant in the reign of Nicholas I. But even thisincipient recognition of interdependence bestowed uponboth civilizations a new spiritual energy and broadenedtheir hozirons to mutual benefit ; the Russian educatedclasses began, under European influence, to strive forliberty under law after the Western model and to fightthe traditional police state autocracy. Europe, on theother hand, drew a new inspiration from the humanwarmth and the deep searchings of the Russian literature,from Gogol to Dostoevski, from Tolstoi to Chekhov.

CULTURAL inlercourse was hampered in precedingcenturies by distances and the scarcity of means ofcommunication. All this has changed rapidly

during the last hundred years. Ever new geographicdiscoveries and technical inventions have made the globeone world, thus realizing in space what has long beenrecognized by religion and science, the existence of onemankind. This geographic and biological unity of acommon earth and a common blood finds its spiritualfulfilment, however, in a plurality and diversity ofcivilizations. Each of them has its specific contributionto make, and complements the others. None of themexhausts the spiritual potentialities of man. In the inter-course and interdependence they find the stimulatingchallenges preserving them from ossification andarousing them to the search for new responses to ever-renewed questions and conquests. Western civilization,with its emphasis on individual liberty and free inquiry,would have been much poorer without the recent meetingwith the ascetic morality of Gandhi and the humanisticwisdom of Rabindranath Tagore, both the fruit ofancient India's contact with the West. The Mediterranean,once the centre from which Western civilization radiated,has witnessed recently at its Western and Easternextremities efforts at re-invigoration of the civilizationsof Spain and of Islam, which in the past have playedtheir great role. All signs portend that an Africancivilization arising out of a strong virgin soil under thefertilization of older civilizations will soon take its placeamong these which in clearly recognized and desiredinterdependence make their contributions to an opensociety based upon freedom and diversity. Such asociety pre-supposes cooperation in the spirit of tolerance.No civilization must think itself in exclusive possessionof the true way and endowed with an infallible insightinto the course of human history.

Russia's contact with Europe produced suddenly andalmost without precedent a literature of the firstmagnitude : its influence radiated back to Europe, and inits turn fertilized the older literatures.

However, the fact that the interdependence ofcivilization releases unprecedented creative energies wasnot easily conceded. Many denied it, and Peter theGreat's work formed in the nineteenth century thesubject of much bitter controversy in Russia. Aninfluential group of Russian patriots, often called theSlavophiles, regarded his opening-up of intercourse withEurope as a misfortune for Russia ; it was believed tohave hindered or destroyed a pure indigenous culturaland spiritual development with exclusive roots in thepeculiar traditions of Russian character and history. TheSlavophiles were convinced that the flowering of Russianculture demanded an isolation from contact with alienelements-Russian culture in itself, and only in itself,contained the seeds for world leadership and world sal-vation. This exclusive nationalism turned againstEurope and against Slavdom's Western neighbours, theGermans. Yet even this Slavophilism with all its claimsto self-sufficiency was not an indigenous Russian growth ;it had developed under the influence of Geiman romanticthought by simply transferring the anti-cosmopolitanismand anti-intellectualism of German folk theories to theSlavs as the bearers of the true spirit. Thus even themost"independent"movements bear witness to theinterdependence of civilization.

It has not always been clearly seen that the veryinsistence upon indigenous development and its uniqueand exclusive originality has been the product of culturalcontact and of an erroneous interpretation of the past.Oriental nationalists have often rejected Westerncivilization as an expression of crude materialismcontrasting it with their pure indigenous spiritualism ; inthis attitude they were influenced by Ruskin and otherEuropean critics of certain aspects of Western civilization.

The degree to which cultural isolationism weakens anddestroys a civilization that refuses to recognize culturalinterdependence in a community of nations, can be seenfrom the attitude of the Chinese at the beginning of thenineteenth century. They were then convinced that theyalone had the correct doctrine and knew the true way,that all others had to learn from them, while they couldgain nothing from alien guidance or influence. Fromthe towering height of their uncritical self-confidence,which placed them in the very centre of all civilizedlife, they built a wall of isolation around themselves andrefused intercourse with other civilizations on a footingof equality. As a result Chinese civilization, in spite ofits venerable antiquity and its unsurpassed records ofbeauty of form and serenity of wisdom, becameproverbial abroad as the model of fossil pedantry. Onlymore recently the intercourse with other civilizationseagerly sought by the educated youth, re-invigorated theChinese civilization. A similar process in other Orientalcountries, from Turkey to the Philippine Islands, inaugur-ated an entirely new period in the history of Asia.

MARCH 1952 Page I 3-UNESCO COURIER

OF all the works of art in theTemple of Koryuji at Kyoto,Japan, perhaps the mostgraceful and subtle is the

statue of Miroku-Bosatsu (shownhere). Made of carved wood andcovered with gold lacquer, the figure(also known as Maitreya Bodhisattvain Sanskrit) dates back to the HakuhoPeriod of the 7th century andrepresents the deity worshipped by"Buddhists as the future Messiah whowill descend from heaven to earth tosave mankind. Until recently thiswas the only treasure of the KoryujiTemple ever made public. Thephotographs which follow on the nextpages are the first ever taken, andthey have never before been published.

M

Unknown treasure

of Japanese art

UNESCO COURIER-Page 14 MARCH 1952

Prince Shotoku Taishi, in whose honour the Koryuji Temple was founded the year after his death,622 A. D., inspired a series of giant coloured drawings on silk portraying his life. Each panel is 16 ft.by 9 ft. Above, portion of one of drawings executed during the Murumachi Period (15-16th century).

Only ten sets of

these photos are

..

In existence

JAPAN is a treasure house of Oriental art-but

much of it has remained unseen and unknown.Priceless glories in the past were so jealouslyguarded in certain temples and monasteries

that most people were never even allowed to look atthem ; and, until recently, making copies or keepingrecords of these treasures was generally forbidden.

As a result, when earthquakes, fire, war or otherdisaster destroyed such temples, not only was re-construction virtually impossible, but the lack ofdetails left a gap in history, religion and art that cannever be filled. And there have been many bigdisasters to artistic masterpieces-for instance, the lossby fire in 1948 of the magnificent main hall of theKoryuji pagoda, one of the country's finest.

Fortunately, the contents of Koryuji had been welldocumented, so that what the flames devoured was notreally lost for ever. But such is not always the case.

Some 25 miles away, in Kyoto, art lovers were notonly horrified about the Koryuji fire ; they werealarmed, too. For Kyoto is proud of its treasures.

Capital of Japan from 794 to 1869, it is noted forits magnificent temples, shrines and monuments, andfor numerous craftsmen who faithfully keep up thefine traditions of Japanese art. But nothing in Kyotois more famed throughout Japan than Koryuji, one ofthe world's oldest wooden temples.

Originally erected in honour of Prince Shotoku (572-621 A. D.), the temple was rebuilt in 1165, and partialrepairs were made in 1558-59. Its outstanding featureis a subtle, refined and graceful statue of the futureBuddist Messiah, Miroku-Bosatsu, believed to havebeen sculptured by the prince himself.

The prince too has his statues in the temple, andit is still the custom for Japan's newly-crownedemperors to send their coronation robes to Koryuji todress one of these royal memorials.

Yet, even at Koryuji, virtually no records were keptto indicate to posterity what it was and all that itcontained. If disaster overcame Koryuji, it would belost in every sense of the word.

The Kyoto Unesco Co-operative Association there-fore arranged to produce a photographic record ofKoryuji in 1950. In all, 184 photographs werecommissioned of its treasures.

Only ten sets were made, however. One each wentto the Emperor of Japan, the Supreme Allied Com-mander in Japan, the Louvre Museum in Paris,the British Museum in London, the Library of Congressin Washington, the Boston Museum of Fine Art, theTokyo National Museum, the Kyoto Museum and theKyoto Unesco Association. The tenth was sent toUnesco headquarters in Paris ; and the photographs onthese pages, selected from the Unesco set, are publishedhere for the first time. RICHARD O'FARRELL,

One of Koryuji's wood statues of Umoregi-Jizo-Bosatsu,the patron god of children, is only the height of achild : 3 ft. 3 ins. A work from the ninth century.

Carved and coloured wooden figure ofHata-no-Kawakatsu, the god who foundedthe famed Temple of Koryuji in 622 A. D.

Upper part of the image of Makira, one of the TwelveDeities, and an attendant to the Messiah of the future,Miroku-Bosatsu. This statue was carved in the year 1064.

MARCH) 952 Page 15-UNESCO COURIER

SYMBOL OAF WISDOM

Hands of Amida-Nyorai, one of the outstanding figures in the long history of Buddhism, show the influenceof Indian art on Japan. Position of hands symbolizes the teaching of wisdom through inner purity, whichleads to tranquillity. Made of carved wood covered with gold lacquer, the statue dates from the ninth century.

Detail of upper body of Miroku-Bosatsu, which reveals theexquisite beauty of the hand and the purity of expressionof the face. The head used to be crowned with a diadem.

Twelfth century image of a god. carved inwood. The existence of this figure onlybecame generally known eleven years ago.

Head of a goddess. This masterpiece in carvednatural wood, dating from the later Heian period (12thcentury), was only discovered on December 28, 1941.

UNESCO COURIER-Page 16 MARCH 1952

MPv

MM

One of the richest yet least known storehouses of Japanese art is the wooden Temple ofKoryuji situated on the western outskirts of Kyoto. Here are preserved the treasures producedby brilliant Japanese sculptors and artists between the 7th and 15th centuries. The historyof Japanese sculpture may be said to date from the introduction of Buddhism from Koreain 552 A. D. less than a century before the construction of the Koryuji Temple. It is surprisingthat so many of the sculptures of Japan still exist since they were often carved in wood and: 1ave been housed in wooden buildings exposed to recurrent conflagrations. Their preserva-tion has been mainly due to the important part that works of art have played in religion and tothe reverent care accorded to them. In spite of this a large number were destroyed by fire andearthquakes. By 1897 systematic State protection was undertaken and thousands of works ofart were classed as"national treasures."Later, photographic records were made of them.No photographs of the art treasures in the Temple of Koryuji were taken, however, until 1950and these masterpieces have therefore remained practically unknown outside Japan up totoday. On pages 13, 14 and 15 we present for the first time a few examples which illustratethe striking grace and beauty preserved at Koryuji. Above, a rear view of the statue of Miroku-Bosatsu, the Buddhist Messiah of the future, formerly the principal figure in the main hallof thrs'much-revered Temp) e. A different statue of the same deity is published on page 13.