Education and the Land.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19805, 18 December 1929, Page 10

Education and the Land.

In all that has been saiil this year about turning boys and girls towards the land by aa " agricultural bias " in education there is not one-tenth of the truth and the wisdom in a single sentence delivered by the headmaster of Christ's College at the school prizegiving on Monday night. " If a "Government really wanted to en- " courage boys to go on the land," Mr Crosse said, 4i it should first begin by '-'making farming a more profitable " business." The reason why farmers' sons often drift away from the land and why other men's sons turn their backs on it is simply that present difficulties are acute and prospects are not inviting: and this is u-ue in a country whose dependence on the land is the first and last of its economic facts and ought to be the ehief influence in shaping its policies. Yet it is far from being considered as it should be and from being as influential as it should be; and this appears in any number of signs, from the prevalence of unemployment in the midst of abundant openings for workers at economic rates to the deliberate selection of farmers for penal taxation. The inversion of sound policy appears in the erection of a rigid wage-fixing system, insensitive to the variation of overseas prices but directly instrumental in raising the

[ cost of production for overseas markets; it appears in the careless use of the taritf; if appears in the lamentable unemployment relief policy, which the Government at once boasts of and srnoth"rs up m secrecy; it appears in the land tax. .1 measure whose temporary m-ei'iilnc;- has lore.' ago been <eit and which now flies in the face of rich* priueiple in taxation; and it appears most flagrantly and unashamedly in Ge present Government's land -'ipcriiix. which drives still hard'-r against 'he ~.>nree of wealth instead "l i'- product, '1 debt as if it were money in poeket. sweetie away j>;iiiiJ u!lv established expiry, and puts frr-h difih-nl-ii - n, the way of enterprise. The .Miru-ier jor hdueation. however, ha- been speaking -■ v.-ith !e-s assurance of late, it should be admitted. —as if the righting of this gigantic wrong were only n >imp!e matter of introducing an " agricultural l)i;:.-" into education. Neither lit nor anybody else has given an intelligible explanation of this bias. what it is and how it will work. Tt is, perhaps, a sort of made. At any rate, if it do, s not work by magic it will not work at all: for. a- the headmaster cf Christ's College said, it is not educational bill economic considerations that in the long nyi determine vocational ehoiee. Teaching agriculture to intending farmers is a good thing; so is any teaching which brings boys and girls, closer to Nature and gives them an affectionate understanding of it. But nothing that Mr At more can do to his syllabuses and time-tables will put more farmers on the land or make more farms pay than economic conditions will allow. Since those conditions have been made adverse to the farmer by political means, the remedy is to undo by political means the harm that has been done.