Orientations By Alcantara Dion, O.F.M., and: Culture de la Liberté au foyer et à l'école By Alcantara Dion, O.F.M. (review)

256BOOK REVIEWS Orientations. By Alcantara Dion, O.F.M. (Montreal: Editions Pax et Bonum , 1945. Pp. 266.) Culture de la Liberté au foyer et à l'école. By Alcantara Dion, O.F.M. (Montreal: L'Ecole Sociale Populaire, 1945. Pp. 32.) The generation born between the two wars owes a debt of gratitude to Father M. Alcantara for the illuminating directives he has given regarding education, and particularly regarding professional orientation. For many years a director of secondary education and professor at Laval University, he has ably made use of his pedagogical knowledge for the benefit of both educators and young people. In the course of the scholastic year 1943-1944, he gave a series of talks at Radio-Collège on the principal careers open to young men. Although he is very practical in these talks, he has intentionally refrained from a pragmatism too much in vogue in the United States and even Canada. Orientations is not a book of recipes for rapid or economical success as, for instance, How to Win Friends and Influence People. It is rather akin to two scholarly works of Mr. Esdras Minville, which it happily completes: Invitation à l'Etude and L'homme d'affaires. It strives to bring out the necessity of steady work and the great advantages of a solid culture as the key to success in whatsoever career may be chosen. At this particularly difficult hour, when our young men, anxious and bewildered, threaten chaos through difficulties in finding employment and through demoralizing inactivity, Orientations is most welcome, and should be for many the life-buoy that will save them. The concrete and precise knowledge of specific exigencies, of the advantages and difficulties inherent in each career, will perhaps be of more actual help than all the hypothetical allocations and subventions which were made to dazzle the eyes of our service men. We now turn to the pamphlet of Father Alcantara. Liberty and liberties are on the lips of all since the start of the war just ended, and especially since the Atlantic Charter. We are told that we fought for liberty and for its triumph over the most inhuman tyranny. This theme seemed so important to the promoters of the Semaines Sociales that they chose it as the most fitting topic for the twenty-fifth Semaine Sociale of Canada, which was held last September in Montreal. R. P. M. Alcantara was entrusted with the paper Culture de la liberté au foyer et à l'école (the cultivation of liberty at home and in the school); and he treated it with the competency of an expert. He states that true liberty consists in the "capacity of doing good." In order that this capacity may be developed in the man of tomorrow, he must be trained to it progressively from his early childhood . The child's will must be trained to love, to want and to choose, what is good, just and honest, not because it is commanded, but because the intellect presents it as desirable. True liberty can result only from the union of intellect and will. Consequently the pedagogue must be an educator rather than a master; he must respect the child's personality, and he must develop in him the sense of personal responsibility, the spirit of initiative. All of this will increase in the child the capacity to act freely and reasonably for his own greater good and that of the community in which he lives. We are grateful to the author for his wise directives and BOOK REVIEWS257 clear explanations. We hope that they may be brought to the attention of many educators, so that they may be helped "to prepare a finer race of men." P. Alfred de Saint-Alexandre, O.F.M. Cap. La Réparation, Pointe-aux-Trembles, Montréal. German Education and Re-education. By Susanne Charlotte Engelmann, Ph.D. (New York: International Universities Press, 1945. Pp. 147. $2.00.) This book presents a brief summary of the history of education in Germany. The author groups her material under three convenient headings: education before the First World War; education under the Republic; education in Hitler's Reich. A single chapter is devoted to each period...