LIBERTY IN EDUCATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 148, 24 June 1932, Page 3

LIBERTY IN EDUCATION.

TEACHINGS OF GOETHE.

"IMPERISHABLE VALUE."

INFLUENCE ON MODERN GERMANS

Comment on the "narrow-minded nationalism" from which the world is suffering was made by Professor G. W. von Zedlitz, president of the German Club in Wellington, in an address on Goethe, the centenary of whose death fell this vear.

"Goethe's whole attitude of mind held two important lessons," said the lecturer. "Useful optimism does not mean denying the unpleasant facts; it means keeping one's mind firmly fixed on improvement, and getting to work right away on any one point, it hardly matters what point, so long as we know (hat. improvement is needed there; it is the getting to work that matters. Secondly, lie had no faith in systems, whether religious, scientific or political. In religion he thought it was equally mischievous to claim a knowledge of the form of what is divine and immortal, as on the other hand to reject altogether the existence of the divine and immortal. In science and politics his bugbear was the static attitude of certainty and the faith in panaceas.

"To him, Russians enforcing belief in Communism and New Zealanders enforcing belief in capitalism would be equally mistaken in imagining that either could offer a solution of the problem of life. The one and only law of life is change, evolution, development, genetic, becoming not static, being. Apart from the imperishable value of this idea, and apart from the treasure of his great poetry, he bestowed on tin. , German people the means of practical success and material prosperity —now dissipated by war—in persuading the Prussian Government of the period to giant liberty of teaching and liberty of learning to the universities.

'"He would have liked to see such liberty extended to schools; no Government anywhere has yet had the- wisdom to do that, and in Now Zealand the thought of educational freedom for either teachers or students is out of practical politics. The marvel is that any Government should even partially have consented to the measure of freedom enjoyed by German universities. For all these reasons modern Germany, cured of '.he feverish dream of national expansion by" the traditional military methods, turns more and more to Goethe us leader and guide."