NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 59, Issue 21, 4 November 1938, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

SMALLER SCHOOL CLASSES. The importance of reducing the size of classes in schools was stressed by Sir Percy Harris, M.P., in a recent speech. “I would even go as far as to say that smaller classes are more important than the raising of the school leaving age,” he said, “for the small class with personal contact and individual attention is vital in .education to-day, especially when there is such danger of the mass mind being created. Teachers are finding themselves in daily competition with the mass influences of broadcasting and the cinema. To-day once a child is out of school the big influences on his mind and character are what he hears over the wireless, and his heroes are the people he sees on the cinema screen. If you are to avoid the mass mind and crowd thought every teacher must encourage individual thinking and personal initiative among children at a very early age.”

BRITISH RACE SUICIDE. “One high authority has estimated that between 1931 and 1951 the number of children in England and Wales will have fallen by 4,000,000 from 9.500,000 to 5,500,000, while those aged 45 and over will increase by 2,500,000,” said Sir Leonard Hill in his presidential address at Edinburgh to the Sanitary Inspectors’ Association. “This is because we have been doing everything to secure comfort and prolong life and nothing to encourage birth of children on which the virility of a nation depends. Figures published by the London County Council on the drop in birth-rate and of children at school confirm these estimates. The British race is on the down grade all over the world, and this is not due to crowding, for in Australia the birthrate has fallen from 42. J in 1860-64 to 16-17 now, and in New Zealand from 40 in 1875-79 to under 17 now. There are no slums in these Dominions and in no other country is there such a high standard of living or life more sunny and pleasant. In contrast the Maoris have a birth-rate of 40. In Quebec, where the brench-Canadians form 79 per cent of the population, the birth-rate is 24-J, while in British Columbia, where the people are almost all British it is 131. French-Canadians, under the influence of their clergy, believe in hard work, thrift, discipline and the duty of having families. In South Africa 58 per cent of the white people are Dutch and 34 per cent British, and the fertility of the former is much higher, but the whites, who are greatly outnumbered by coloured people, are declining. Even if the British change in their present attitude to birth it takes at least 15 years to make a. worker, and much longer to educate one of the governing class, whoso birth-rate is 50 per cent down. Expenditure on armaments, roads and buildings increases by vast amounts, and for whom when children in 20 years are to be halved in number.”