Propaganda and Leisure Reading

7(7ARIOUS scholarly attempts to define propaganda have not gone far beyond the statement that propaganda is selected evidence. That is, the difference between propaganda and truth is the difference between a part and the whole of the pertinent facts. Various minority groups, ranging from super-patriots to power-trusts, have been accused of using devious means to secure the adoption of elementaryand highschool textbooks in which their interests are somewhat glorified. But much less attention has been paid to propaganda on the collegiate level, doubtless on the assumption that the students can recognize it as such and therefore can beware. The weakness of any such assumption is apparent in the typical undergraduate's preference for what is interestingly presented as distinct from what is demonstrably true. Appeals to group loyalties and to group prejudices are proverbially effective. The curricula of the American college have accordingly attempted, by prescribing varied programs for the junior-college classes and by other means, to present subjects as wholes, to teach the importance of checking the completeness and validity of sources, and to develop a critical attitude toward conclusions based upon unreliable data. Authorities on the collegiate curriculum are hard at work on this major problem of giving the student an adequate perspective. Hence the danger is less that students will be misled by propaganda in respect to matters which are covered by systematic courses of instruction than in respect to matters not so covered. Many significant problems confronting the college student are not treated by systematic courses simply because the problems have no departmental classification; for example, sex, militarism, crime, business ethics, and personal ideals. The student's equipment for dealing with such problems consists of information obtained from entirely casual sources such as early home influences, conversation with other students, and media like popular literature, the theater, and motion pictures which no one can escape. Here propaganda is most insidious and effective, since from these sources the undergraduate obtains only what is interesting, and this presumably falls considerably short of the whole truth. It is here also that the most deliberate attempts are made to restrict the supply of reading-matter within certain social and political limits-by city

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