TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 263, 5 November 1932, Page 8

TRACTS FOR THE TIMES.

POLITICS AND CLASSICS

(By PRO BONO PUBLICO.)

Onco or twice lately during the controversy about education I have noticed a tendency to reflect on the qualification of members of Parliament either to legislate for or to administer an education system. The suggestion is that if a member of Parliament has had only a primary school course lie can't know anything about education. Whether this argument is right or wrong is mot for mo to say, but I am afraid it is a fact that our Parliamentarians in general aro not very well educated.

The same complaint, or criticism, is made in otlier countries. A well-known American publicist lately described Congress as. consisting mostly of people wlio would be. overpaid at 3000 dollars a. year and who were clinging to a 9000dollar job without being able to measure up to it. In England, G. M. Trevelyan expressed the educational shortcomings of Parliament more politely when ho said that in the seventeenth century members of Parliament used to be, fond of quoting the Bible, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they quoted the classics and in the twentieth they quoted nothing at all.

The last time Latin was quoted in our own House, I believe, was when someone suggested a tag from the Georgics as a motto for John Mclvenzie's land settlement policy, something to the effect that ii? was all right to praise big estates, but the wise man cultivated a small farm. Long before that when a candidate for Parliament in Canterbury ventured to quote a Latin text from the platform he was howled down with the shout of "No Chinese"—Asiatic immigration being a burning question at the time. But when I was a youngster it was common to hear Latin and Greek tags and to see them in print. My first boss liked to air his knowledge of the classics —I can still recall half a dozen or so of his favourite tags—and many of his friends were of like habit.

The point is that many of the men who went into the House in those days were well educated, as education went then. It is true that educational ideas have broadened immensely, but that is surely a reason for demanding a higher standard and not a lower standard in our legislators and administrators. In the Old Country the chief eomplaint is that the politicians lack intellectual courage, that they will not face the factt. or think out the consequences of the facts; and I imagine that that is one of. the failings of our own representatives. Not that a knowledge of the classics is a guarantee of clear thinking. A man can have little Latin and'' less Greek and still be a souncf administrator. But education will make him a sounder one r.nd Counder legislator. Unfortunately we are in an age that lias no great respect for culture or for intellect, and that fact has an obvious bearing on the standards of modern Parliaments.