The Need to Know

In his first speech as Assistant Secretary of State in charge of public and cultural relations, Archibald MacLeish last week laid down a vital premise: "If the peoples of the world are informed about each other, their decisions with relation to each other will be just decisions . . . for the maintenance of peace."

That the world's peoples still have a lot to learn about each other was apparent last week to any newspaper reader. Summarizing the results of surveys in recent years in the comparatively well-informed U.S., Pollster Elmo Roper concluded, in the New York Herald Tribune, that many U.S. citizens were appallingly uninformed even about their closest Allies. Samples of ignorance:

P: 28% of the U.S. population have no idea what forms the bulk of Canadian production (food and raw materials) while 17% believe it consists of manufactured articles. (Only 38% of U.S. farmers know that, next to the U.S., Canada is the biggest wheat producer in the hemisphere.)

P:At a time when her food scarcity was being widely publicized, only 69% knew that England was not primarily a food-producing nation.

P:Only 45% of the nation's high-school students and 40% of its factory workers know that in Russia (of which the U.S. is most ignorant) everyone does not get exactly the same pay, no matter what his job.

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