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140 14.The London School of Economics in particular has probably contributed much more to the excitation
of nationalistic sentiment than any other educational institution in the world. At the School of Economics,
145 the late Professor Harold Laski did more than any other single individual to hearten the colonial students
and to make them feel that the great weight of liberal Western learning supported thier political enthusiasm.
15.
However, it was not only in the universities of London and Paris, but in shabby clubs and cafes,
150 cheap hotels and restaurants, dingy rooming houses and the tiny cluttered offiees of their nationalist
organizations that the colonial students were educated in nationalism, acquired some degree of national
consciousness, and came to feel how retrograde their own countries were and what they might be if only
155 they became their own masters and modernized themselves. Personalities like Mr. Krishna Menon, Or.
Nkrumah, and Dr. Banda were themselves formed in these milieux, and in turn formed many of those who
were to play an active part in the movement in their own countries.
160 16.The political propensities of the students have been, in part, products of adolescent rebelliousness.
This has been especially pronounced in those who were brought up in a traditionally oppressive
environment and were indulged with a spell of freedom from that environment — above all, freedom from
165 the control of the elders and kinsmen. Once, however, the new tradition of rebellion was established among
students, it became self-reproducing. Moreover, the vocational prospectlessness of their post-university
situation has also stirred the restiveness of the students.
160 17.The Unemployed Intellectual. In most underdeveloped countries during the colonial period, the
unemployed intellectual was always a worry to the foreign rulers and to constitutional politicians, and a
grievance of the leaders of the independence movement. He still remains a problem in the underdeveloped
175 countries which have had a higher educational system for some length of time and which are not rapidly
expanding their governmental staffs. In Ghana or Nigeria, there is a shortage of intellectuals and all
graduates can find posts; in Pakistan, which inherited only a very small part of the higher educational
180 system of British India, the government has tried to restrict entrance to the universities, especially in «arts»
subjects. In India and Egypt, however, despite rapid expansion of opportunities for the employment of
intellectuals in government, there has been a more than proportionate expansion in the number of university
185 graduates and the problem remains as acute as ever.
18.Yet the difficulty is not so much «intellectual unemployment» as under— and mal-employment.
Most of the graduates sooner or later, do find posts of one sort or another, but they are not posts which
190 conform with expectations. They are illpaid, unsatisfying in status and tenure, and leave their incumbents
in the state of restlessness which they experienced as students.
From: Edward Shils, «The Intellectuals in the Political
Developement of the New States», in Finkle and
Gable (eds.) Political Development and Social Change (1966).
ISOLATION
From: Edwin O. Reishauer, The Japanese
(1)
One final, vital fact about the geographic setting of the Japanese is their relative isolation. Japan lies
off the eastern end of the Old World, in much the same way the British Isles lie off its western end, but
5
at considerably greater distance. The more than a hundred miles that separate the main Japanese islands
from Korea is roughly five times the width of the Straits of Dover. In the time of primitive navigation it
constituted a considerable barrier, and the roughly four hundred and fifty miles of open sea between Japan
10
and China were even more formidable.
(2)
Troughout most of its history Japan has been perhaps the most isolated of all the major countries of
the world. Until the dawn of oceanic commerce in the sixteenth century it was fitfully in contact
15
with its two closest neighbors, Korea and China, but influences from further afield came to Japan only as
filtered through these two lands. In more modem times, Japan's rulers took advantage of their natural
geographic isolation to fix on the country a firm policy of seclusion from the outside world. For more than
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two centuries, from 1638 to1853, the Japanese were almost completely sequestered from foreign contacts.
It was a unique experience at a time of quickening international and interregional relations elsewhere in the
world.
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(3) Thus natural geographic isolation at first, compounded later by human design, forced the Japanese
to live more separately from the rest of the world than any other comparably large and advanced group of