"NO HOPE ON THE LAND!"

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 295, 14 December 1938, Page 10

"NO HOPE ON THE LAND!"

[ "Perhaps the most serious aspect of the problem of primary industries is the very general eonviction whieh I find throughout the community that there is no hope on the land." This statement of Mr. Noel Gibson, headmaster of the Dilworth School, a school founded to equip boys for primary production, is a challenge to the Dominion the importance of which it is difficult to over-estimate. Mr. Gibson is a practical and experienced teacher, his work brings him into close touch with the people of the land. His warning that parents are discouraging their sons from taking up farm work because they can see no future for them as land workers or as land holders must not be allowed quietly to fade from notice, as in the case of other warnings. It is not enough to say that opportunities are as great as ever they were. The immediate necessity is to implement a "poor man's'' land policy, so that young men who have had the advantage of training for primary production may be given the opportunity to strike out for themselves, on a small scale perhaps, but still to farm their own acres.