CRANKS AND THE CHILD.

Auckland Star, Volume LV, Issue 219, 15 September 1924, Page 4

CRANKS AND THE CHILD.

i . In Friday's debate on the Education estimates a member of the Labour party, ■discussing propaganda in schools, cited I Mr. G, B. Shaw, and rebuked Mr. Wilford i when he interjected "a crank of cranks." I Unfortunately the reports we have seen Ido not show . what particular views of Mr. Shaw's Mr. Fraser referred to. Was it anything like thi3, that "every child I has a right to its own bent, and the J right of liberty begins, not at the age of twenty-one years, but at the age of twenty-one Mr. Shaw is a genius, but a perverse one. He is a rod of .correction .for the conventional and i the stupid, a scavenger of intellectual ! litter. Often he compels you at least to I reconsider your ideas. With due respect Ito Mr. Fraser, however, there are many i "intelligent people" who, having. regard' jto Mr. Shaw's emotional limitations and his extraordinary perversity, are quite unable to accept him as a guide to life. He has talked nonsense on many subjects, children among them. So many of these advanced thinkers do. I "Socialism," cays Mr. H. G. Wells, "proposes to abolish altogether the patriarchal family amidst whose disintegra- , -ting ruins we live, and to raise women to an equal citizenship with men. The old family of the private individual must vanish before it. The Socialist no more regards the institution of marriage as a permanent' thing than he regards a state of competitive indusi trialism as a permanent thing." Poor children of the future! The child to-day is encompassed by cranks, and it is difficult to say which would be the worse ' for him—that he should be the victim of the unrestrained zeal of those who wish to measure him and weigh him and mould him according to innumerable theories as if he were entirely public ; property, or that he should be allowed to do just as he liked.