DIFFICULT GOALS

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIV, Issue 293, 10 December 1943, Page 4

DIFFICULT GOALS

YOUTH AND IDEALS

U.S. PROFESSOR AT BREAK-UP

"The young people of to-day have all, we hope, progressive ideals. They dc not all have optimism and confidence. They see the goals clearly; they also see clearly that they are going to be difficult to win," said Professor Allan Nevins, of Columbia University, New York, who is on a lecture tour of New Zealand in connection with the United States Office of War Information, at the annual prize-giving of the Seddon Memorial Technical College this morning. "How can they attain the ideal?" asked the professor. "It will not do to take the disillusioned, defeatist attitude which marked ,so many young people after the last war. It is true that reforms are hard to win, that hard battles have to be fought again and again before final victory comes, that incompetence and stupidity and greed are more powerful in many instances than the right. But to take a defeatist attitude is to givoup the fight before it. is begun. What is important is confidence, hope, and a consciousness of the duty of active citizenship." Professor Nevins was introduced by the chairman of the board of managers, Mr. F. G. Fowler, who gave ' a special message for those' students who were leaving the college. He expressed the opinion that in the future the relationship between employer and employee must be on a far better footing, and one way of achieving this would be by the' adoption of some system of profit sharing. He advised every farseeing student to plan to be a specialist in his occupation, saying that this was where the technical colleges and like institutions would come into their own, by educating young people who would be the nucleus from which specialist staffs could be built.