“Morally....”
I could not embark at this last moment upon a discussion of what are morals through an interpreter. I thought. I hesitated. I wondered, as I never had wondered before, about Trotzky, and then I admitted that so far as I knew, Trotzky was a moral man!
Friday, July 29, 1921. Mexico City.
This evening José Vasconselos came to see me and we talked for nearly two hours. He is head of the Department of Education. I am told he is one of the most brilliant and most promising men of Mexico. I felt that a talk with him would do much to help me to understand what the present Government is aiming at, and what effort is being made for the future of Mexico. I tackled him at once very frankly about his education system. I said to him: “The bourgeois tell me that you have caused to be printed 20,000 copies of Shakespeare and Homer for illiterate Indians, who can neither read nor write.”
This criticism was no news to him, he proceeded to explain to me that these classics were for the town libraries, and there were 10,000 towns. “What would you put in the libraries?” he asked—“What would you have the people read as soon as they can read?” He said that he was basing his system on the Carnegie System, and that during one of the former Revolutions when he was an exile, he lived at San Antonio, Texas. There he went into the Public Library and borrowed an edition of Plato. Every book that is loaned is inscribed with the name and date of the person to whom it is loaned. “In one year, that volume of Plato had been loaned to thirty people, and that was San Antonio, a community of cowboys.”
He explained to me his great difficulty in getting enough books for the 10,000 libraries. He said that if he wrote to Madrid for 10,000 volumes of Don Quixote, they could only supply him with 500. So he must get them printed himself. He promised me a complete set of the standard library works. This had nothing to do with the elementary books distributed to the schools. He said he would like me to see, in some of the little towns how keen the Indian parents are on education for their children.
“When the next generation are educated—then will evolve the real Socialist State!” he said.
He referred to the reign of Porfirio Diaz as having accomplished nothing for the education of the masses. His ideas about social reform are Spartacist, he quoted Liebknecht and said that he favored the plan of limited fortunes, rather than communism, as the one seemed to him to kill initiative, and he did not like the idea of being a slave to the State. The only class he really despised was the bourgeois, “people who eat three meals a day, how can their brains work—?” People who assume an attitude of culture, but who never open a book, certainly not a classic. How dared they attempt to criticize! “The only thing in their favor in this country is that at least they don’t have any part in the affairs of the government!”
Vasconselos is a queer personality, mixture of Spanish and Mexican, yet he said he cared nothing for the civilization of the Occident, he understood better the Orient, and followed in the train of Tagore, whom he talked of with great admiration. I asked him whether on the whole he was satisfied with the way things were shaping for Mexico, and he said he was certainly satisfied. That in his opinion revolutions were a thing of the past, there were a stirring and an awakening all through the land.
We discussed literature, art, social reforms, education of children, Russian evolution, the compromises of Lenin, the activities of Trotzky, the prejudices, the ignorances, the indifferences of the bourgeois, the national spirit of Mexico, the planet we live in and the ineptitude of humans to adapt themselves to it. He said he felt it was almost a crime to put children into the world: “If they are stupid, indifferent and incapable of thought they are little better than the brutes, if they are intellectuals and have any ideas and ideals at all, then they suffer unendurably—No, this world, even with its mountains and its lakes and its vegetation, it is no place for humans...!”