Word: winspear
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Applause, with a scattering of hosannas, greeted Harvard's $60,000 report on General Education in a Free Society (TIME, Aug. 13). Last week brought a belated, resounding Bronx cheer from the far left. Wrote British-born Author Alban Dewes (Who Was Socrates?) Winspear in the Communist New Masses: "Unsophisticated freshmen who enter Harvard College assume that they are entering an institution devoted to the unbiased search for truth. This [report] makes it only too clear that they are to enter a slick machine for indoctrination and reactionary propaganda...
...Critic Winspear, who is director of Chicago's leftish Abraham Lincoln School, got maddest at one of Harvard's suggested reading lists which he said "apparently stopped with the great classics of laissez-faire. From such a list [Adam Smith, Rousseau, Mill et al.] ... no student would ever glean 'dangerous thoughts...
Harvard's "groping for a core subject," said Winspear, "is in reality a groping for a satisfactory synthesis of all [the] reactionary programs of retreat." Winspear generously offered his own idea of a core curriculum: Karl Marx...
...pupils was Critias, who, Professor Winspear says, "had been a young man of democratic sympathies" before he fell under Socrates' influence. Critias became the Adolf Hitler of his day. When Athenian aristocrats, with Sparta's help, established an oligarchy, Critias led "the notorious and bloody reactionary dictatorship of the Thirty," which executed some 1,500 Athenians. When Athenian democrats returned to power, they decided "to hew the head off and not hack the limbs," condemned Socrates to death...
Professor Winspear concludes that the picture of Socrates by Plato, himself violently antidemocratic, was not a true one, but "the extremely adroit and facile plea of a partisan." He believes that the evidence "should make us very hesitant to accept the conventional explanation that a high-minded and guiltless philosopher fell an innocent victim to the . . . passions...