The New Loyalty.

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20905, 12 July 1933, Page 8

The New Loyalty.

An Auckland teacher, Mr Noel Gibson, has written to the Minister for Education deploring the inclusion in the June number of the " School " Journal " of a poem entitled " The " New Loyalty." After examining the first two lines very carefully, Mr Gibson has come to the conclusion I that their teaching "savours much " of the Third International," a conclusion which is supported, he says, by two university professors and the headmasters of four of the leading Auckland secondary schools. It would indeed be deplorable if the editor of the "School Journal," through his uncritical enthusiasm for the brotherhood of man, turned any large section of New Zealand primary school pupils into militant communists. Most people will feel, however, that the poem is more likely to corrupt the literary taste of school children than to fill them with subversive thoughts. Its ideas are muddled, it scans badly, and its wording is atrocious. Mr Gibson would have been wise to lay more emphasis on these faults, for whereas the politics of the "School Journal " are usually above reproach, its literary standards are consistently low.