EDUCATION 511 



azalea, and I think there are opportunities here which deserve much 

 more imaginative thinking. 



We would also like to see a task force consider what could be done 

 in a more specific sense of popular education by the setting up of 

 summer schools and institutes in cooperation with universities, to give 

 the citizen a picture, not only of what could be done, but to under- 

 stand the mechanics of what is happening now. I think this is a 

 major concern of ours. 



After all, in our cities, we are dealing with an enormous organic 

 process. The thing I would like to come back to is this : How many 

 of us as citizens understand the forces at work, the economic inter- 

 est at stake, the place where these economic interests absolutely 

 contradict each other, and above all, where the citizens want two 

 or three things equally, not realizing that they contradict each 

 other? An enlightenment of the mind by specific education would 

 be enormously helpful. 



Our last specific proposal is that we should have a task force 

 to try and bring together the enormous amount of information 

 that exists on natural beauty, on conservation, on the problems 

 of maintaining a truly beautiful environment, either civic or rural. 

 This should come together in libraries and in development and 

 conservation centers, so that people who are interested could easily 

 refer to it and get the kind of information they need to become 

 informed citizens. Quite clearly, the amount of absolutely ad- 

 mirable work by voluntary societies, wildlife societies and by the 

 Audubon Society, is not, in fact, as easily available to the inter- 

 ested citizens as it would be if there were these concentrations of 

 information and material. 



Those are the specific things that we would like to propose. 

 But, in addition, we all feel that nothing is going to be done in 

 this field unless the citizen has an understanding of the vast forces 

 at work in our society, which have made the environment we 

 have, an environment which is in many ways unsatisfactory, and 

 therefore an environment which has to be changed if natural beauty 

 is to be achieved. We don't think of natural beauty as a bit of 

 lace on the edge of the corset although you can do a lot with a 

 corset. We think of the structure of society as a whole. 



First of all, inevitably, universally, but rather more rapidly in 

 some countries than others, we confront population growth. We are 

 not dealing with a static problem. We are dealing with the most 



