Educational Vandalism

When Napoleon's troopers stabled their horses in Milan's monastery of Santa Maria delle Grazie and scribbled on Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper, they were behaving as soldiers have always behaved in Europe's wars. But Axis vandalism against other nations' cultures has been deliberate and systematic.

Last week Axis Oppression of Education, a pamphlet issued by the Inter-Allied Information Committee, described worldwide Axis vandalism against education. Of special interest was the description of the actions of the Japanese.

Says the pamphlet: "The Tsing Hua University in Peiping ... is used by the Japanese mainly as a hospital for their wounded soldiers. The auditorium ... is being used as a meeting place for the troops. . . . The eastern half of the biological laboratory is a stable, while the classroom attached to it is a bar. . . . The new southern residential quarters have become Japanese brothels."

The pamphlet also quotes Japanese as advocating a "uniform system of education for Japan, Korea, 'Manchukuo' and North China" and "Japanese as the language of East Asia." This language program is already in force in the Philippines, though it lags due to a shortage of instructors who can speak both Japanese and Filipino.

But Japanese educational outrages have been worst in China. Of 108 Chinese colleges, 14 were razed, 15 damaged by bombs, 25 forced to close. Others are still being bombed. Mission schools in Occupied China, mostly undisturbed before Pearl Harbor, are now closed. Education is organized under local bureaus of education, each with a Jap "adviser." Instruction in Japanese is compulsory and the instructor is invariably a Jap, charged with caring for the "thought and morals" of his pupils--i.e., a spy.

Textbooks have been revised in accordance with Jap ideas on history, politics and ethics. Though some students and teachers have been arrested and tortured, "educators are ever being offered trips to Japan and 'Manchukuo' to see how the 'Friendly Neighbor' does things and to understand her intentions towards China."

Subject prescribed by Friendly Neighbor for a Chinese essay contest: "Why we should overthrow Chiang Kai-shek."

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