LOUDSPEAKERS AND BOOKS

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 116, 12 November 1938, Page 29

LOUDSPEAKERS AND BOOKS

It seems a pity that wireless, the friend of education in the school, should so often be allowed to become its enemy in the home, says the London "Times." Miss Ruth Dawson, who addressed educationists at the British Association meeting recently, reminded them that children now are born into noise, and she put first among the noises that of the continuous loudspeaker. Mental activity becomes almost impossible in homes where the stream of sound is never checked or where, if it is, neighbouring loudspeakers blare incessantly through the partition walls. And this is curely true of millions of homes now. Miss Dawson said rightly that, in this world of noise and distraction, what a child most needs is not to accumulate facts but to learn to think, to form right judgments. And the more successfully education can achieve this aim, the more will the misuse of wireless tend to disappear, for a generation that has learned both to read and to think is not likely- to tolerate it. Books and wireless will be allotted their reasonable share of time, one as the proper complement of the other. ~,. w ..