The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and The Echo and The Sun. SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1930. CULTURE AND LIVELIHOOD.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 187, 9 August 1930, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News, and The Echo and The Sun.

SATURDAY, AUGUST 9, 1930. CULTURE AND LIVELIHOOD.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the t future in the And the good that we can do.

"God bless the higher mathematics, and may they never be of any use to anybody." Such is a toast that used to be given at Cambridge, the greatest of mathematical universities. It embodies, of course, an exaggeration. Higher mathematics are of some use to somebody. But the exaggeration expresses an ideal pushed to an extreme, the ideal of knowledge for its own sake. It is Avorth recalling to-day because Professor Belshaw, to whom, as an old Cambridge student, the toast may be familiar, has been expounding to Auckland business men a different ideal, that of definite University preparation for a business or professional career.

Possibly Professor Belshaw is not so critical as his words suggest of the old academic conception of a university as a place where the pursuit of culture is entirely untrammelled by any : considerations of subsequent occupation, but his remarks may have an unfortunate effect in a community that is already too much disposed to measure education with a material rule. It is true that the university must help to prepare students for professions and business. We expect (or Ave should expect) teachers to obtain degrees; we ask the University to train lawyers; and it is hoped that an increasing number of young men who mean to enter business will equip themselves with a university training. It is also perfectly true that the number of students who can afford to spend four or five years at a New Zealand university college, with no thought of subsequent occupation, is very small. But it would be a profound mistake to regard a university purely as a place where men and women were prepared fo.-, callings. Professor Belshaw recognises this danger, for while he thinks that the purpose of a university "must be adjusted to the needs of a work-a-day world," and that its main function is "a preparation for effective service in such a world," he tells the business men of Auckland that it is the function of a university to teach principles and not detailed technique.

Here Professor Belshaw touches the root of the matter. A business man who expects a university graduate to enter his office fullyequipped to direct office routine, quite mistakes the functions of the university. He should be content with someone from a commercial college. As Professor Belshaw says, it is the business of the university to provide a knowledge of principles in the light of which business facts can be handled. We may go further and say it is the function of the university to supply a liberalising education that will help the student to make the best of life, Professor Belshaw points out that over-insistence on technical training had debased education in some universities in America; and we must be on guard against the same danger here. The ideal of a "practical" education generally means nothing more than training for profit, and a university, if it is to have a soul, must stand for something higher. But even culture pursued for its own sake may be turned to profit. Both in England and America business men are discovering that some of the young college graduates who make the best recruits in offices have been trained in the classics, -with no eye for a special occupation. Moreover, an education that trains for work only is sadly incomplete. A man may be judged by the use he makes of his leisure. "On the lowest ground," Mr. Baldwin has said, "how good it is for us to have some outlet—indeed, something that opens a window to one's soul completely remote and alien from one's daily work." University study in New Zealand must necessarily be connected fairly closely with occupation, but that is no reason why the ideals of liberal education and disinterested pursuit of culture should be surrendered.