Life Begins with Freedom
The College Nisei, 1942-1945
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 9883103 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Thomas James (0000-0002-0207-0999, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1985 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 1/2 |
| Pages | 155 |
| Publication date | 1985-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | History of Education Quarterly (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0018-2680 • E-ISSN: 1748-5959 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/368895 |
| OpenAlex | W2329812265 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
EDUCATION, wrote Margaret Mead in 1943, creates a drama of between parents and children in modern life. By encouraging children to be different from their parents, education holds forth the possibility, unknown to traditional societies, of introducing new values, even bringing new worlds into being. The dark side of this possibility is that education can degenerate into techniques of power, teaching through irndoctrination and locking the future into coercive relations of and inferiority while conditions of life change in other respects. To avoid such a prospect, she argued, education should be placed at the service of learning instead of manipulation, spontaneity instead of control. A proper use of the discontinuity between parent and child would be to devise and practice a system of education which sets the future free.'1 During the year before Mead published these views, the United States government evacuated more than 110,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in western states, placed them in temporary assembly centers under the control of the U.S. Army, then moved them inland to ten relocation centers in wilderness and barren lands, guarded by military police and administered by a civilian agency of the government. The reflections of an anthropologist may seem ethereal when compared to the reality of fenced enclosures with rows of barracks inside and guard towers at intervals around the perimeter. Nevertheless, her perspective illuminates the dilemma of the camps in relation to democratic traditions of education in the twentieth century. Mead located the menace of totalitarianism as a potential within her own society, where a spurious sense of superiority had corrupted education. What was true for education in general was even more real and present for Japanese Americans during the war. For them, the value of education depended, in part, on deciding whether freedom might possibly exist in the future, even when their current investment in learning was being made under circumstances of manifest oppression. This decision about the future, unlike the order to build the camps or the administrative policies that ensued, had to be made by the Japanese Americans themselves, and it could be no more than a guess, whether informed by hopeful conviction or bitter disillusionment
Academic freedom · Higher education · Political science · Sociology · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Japanese History and Culture · Law
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,13 |
| Citation span | 1987 - 2025 (39) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 5 |