The Canadian Political Science Association is doing Laval a great honour in holding its annual meeting here and in asking some of us to contribute to its scientific discussions. We thank the Association very warmly indeed and we are happy that this occasion affords us the opportunity for new and fruitful contacts.

It was suggested that this paper should put forward our ideas relating to the teaching of social sciences. I will do so as simply as possible, without the slightest intention of imposing it upon anyone. In order to be more concrete and more concise, I shall try to set forth, as objectively and as unassumingly as possible, what is being done at Laval and why it is done. It must be kept in mind, at the outset, that the institution I want to report upon is still very young, still in a formative stage, still involved in initial experiments and, hence, still far from having found its final shape.

It is then my intention to put before you our conception of social studies and, at the same time, to describe the faculty which has been set up according to this conception. Since any systematic study always involves two things: a subject-matter and an aim for which it is studied, my remarks will simply follow this sequence pattern.

My paper contains no theoretical aspects of physical planning; it merely recounts the progress that is being made in Great Britain in the pursuit of adequate legal and administrative measures to make physical planning a purposeful reality. The principles upon which the statutory instruments of planning have been devised are startlingly different today from the vague and somewhat superficial considerations which underlay the first planning measures enacted in 1909. In that year the purpose of planning was understood to be the preservation of amenity by regulatory control; today, planning is recognized in Great Britain to be one of the main functions of the internal affairs of government whereby the integration of public and private enterprise is to be achieved so as to insure an ordered and balanced national development. Planning is accepted as the matrix of national endeavour; as an instrument whereby positive development in the national interest may be assured.

Of the 38 million acres of land in England and Wales, about 27 million acres were embraced by planning schemes at the outbreak of the war. The schemes ranged from proposals for the safeguarding of great stretches of moorland in the interests of the preservation of natural beauty, to plans for the redevelopment of small areas of urban decay; and varied, too, from proposals of a purely advisory nature to statutory schemes operating under the planning law of the country. The operative schemes covered an area of a little over a million acres.

The purpose of this paper is to present a review of French economic thought. It has, however, definite limitations as to content and scope. First of all, it is restricted to the field of economic theory, because it was simply impossible to cover the other subjects of economic science. It is also limited in its scope, since many economists are not even mentioned. It deals especially with the contributions which, although not widely known, are important in the development of economic theory. Going beyond a simple restatement of the theories as originally expounded by their authors, it seeks to stress points of real interest for us. The following analysis is also purely descriptive; scarcely any criticism will be made of the works reviewed. Finally, in order to avoid subjectivism, which is always possible in essays of this kind, we will use the method of quoting abundantly from the original sources, a method less brilliant, perhaps, than summarizing but certainly more objective, offering, as it does, more direct contact with the authors themselves.

French contributions to modern economic theory may be viewed as a long cycle containing several phases. The first phase, extending from the Physiocrats to Walras, is marked by important developments which are at the origin of all the modern schools of thought. The second phase, which the outbreak of the Second World War brought to a close, is a period of decline; that downward movement can be explained, as we shall see, by several factors. Finally, many signs of revival have appeared in recent years.

The subject of adult education has been chosen for this paper in order to provide a point of orientation for the discussion of certain related social problems of the western farming community. The conclusions are based upon field studies of several contrasting rural communities in Manitoba carried out under the direction of the Manitoba Royal Commission on Adult Education. Some characteristics of governmental institutions, farm movements, and farming conditions are peculiar to that province but basic similarities in the social structure of farming communities throughout the Prairie region mean that most of the findings have a wider application. It is necessary for reasons of space to treat ethnic communities only briefly, but this brevity may be partially justified on the grounds that the British-origin farming community represents the ideal type to which the ethnic communities are assimilating at various rates.

The difficulty of defining adult education may be avoided by noting briefly its place in the educational process. In complex societies the term “education” has commonly been used to apply to the explicit function of the formal institutions through which social groups prepare young candidates for adult participation. It is apparent that, in terms of this social function, education is part of the more inclusive processes of socialization and acculturation necessary to all social groups and carried out in many societies without benefit of formal institutions. To prepare the young for integration in social groups as adults it is necessary that they acquire and incorporate in their personalities at least a minimum of the normative behaviour patterns necessary to various social roles as well as learn such elements of the cultural tradition (systems of knowledge, techniques, value-patterns, language, art, and the other expressional forms) as the adults controlling the training deem desirable. Although an unprecedented amount of training is acquired within formal institutions in our society, these institutions provide only part of the training necessary for social participation as an adult.

The Need for Income and Employment Security. In modern times insecurity of income has been the lot of many workers in most countries. This income insecurity is the result of the effects of seasonal variations, cyclical fluctuations, secular changes, and random fluctuations upon production in individual plants and businesses. Production in industries such as meat packing, fruit canning, or clothing manufacturing is typically seasonal because of the nature of their raw materials, or of the demand for their products. Cyclical fluctuations in economic activity affect the economy as a whole but hit particularly severely durable goods industries such as the building and construction industry, or the automobile industry. Further, the economy is subject to secular changes owing to such causes as changes in the size and age structure of the population, technological advance, or changes in the buying habits of consumers. In addition, economic phenomena exhibit chance or random fluctuations.

The security of income and employment of the working population is affected by all these different types of economic variations but it is with cyclical and seasonal unemployment that we are concerned chiefly here. It is difficult to determine whether a worker is suffering as a result of either cyclical or seasonal unemployment as there is generally a combination of both in most industries. In many cases, however, unemployment is markedly cyclical or seasonal in character although it is little consolation to the worker to know the kind of unemployment of which he is the victim.

It is customary to regard the planning function as being distributed over three levels of government—national, local and regional. This analysis radically differs from existing administrative machinery in most modern states: nevertheless it has been widely recognized that comprehensive, nation-wide planning cannot be carried out solely through the normal processes of national and local government. There is a need for a new level of power and responsibility: a level of government intermediate in function between central government and the municipality both geographically and administratively. To quote E. A. Gutkind: “Planning implies a systematic procedure starting from the top and the bottom at the same time. It includes large-scale plans as well as local plans, or in other words, its general framework consists of a national plan while local plans constitute, as it were, the cellular components which are bound together through the medium of regional schemes. Consequently planning proceeds on the different levels of national, regional and local activities forming one coherent whole ….”

Although this idea is probably true of planning, however its field is defined, it is worth remembering that the word is loose in meaning, and that under it several very different activities have been lumped together. In its commonest usage, planning means city planning: the reconstruction of cities to render them more efficient and more liveable. Though such planning usually requires permissive national legislation for its prosecution, it is emphatically a local activity, carried out normally in the smallest governmental units. Primarily, it is a matter for the architect and the engineer. But equally vital (perhaps more vital) to the community is the planning work of the conservationist, who is concerned to stop the wastage of physical resources and amenities. In the United States, the conservation movement has gathered impetus in this century until there are now many governmental agencies wholly concerned with work of this character. The work chiefly rests with either state or federal agencies: it involves too great an expenditure and too wide a viewpoint to be carried out locally. Lastly there is the group of purely national activities we can label economic and social planning, which may cover anything from public investment policies to such matters as the relocation of industry, the colonization of hitherto undeveloped country, or the systematic restriction of some field of production.