“GLORIFYING SPEED AND SPORT”

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22004, 30 January 1937, Page 14

“GLORIFYING SPEED AND SPORT”

EDUCATIONIST ON MODERN

TRENDS

(FKOII OT7B OWN COEBESPOJTDEXT.)

LONDON, January 2.

“Vulgarity, vice and crime” as depicted by the cinema and the “glorification of reckless- men and women who established records that benefited nobody save the manufacturers of machinery.” were declared by Miss Agnes B. Muir, president of the Educational Institute of Scotland, to be of the greatest danger to educational progress. She was making her presidential address to the annual congress of the institute in Edinburgh. Many schools to-day glorified speed for_ its own sake, and they had been driven to adopt a motto alien to the Scottish character, “Safety first.” The machine seemed to have so outrun spiritual progress that it was perilously near crushing out civilisation altogether. What else did the average youth glorify? The benefactors of mankind and the pioneers must take a back seat behind boxers, professional footballers, and cinema stars. People were content to be “fans”—an appropriate designation, for they were beating the air.

The cinema, instead of being a splendid instrument of enlightenment and education, was to an alarming extent presenting to the eyes of the masses of its patrons, among whom were children and adolescents, patterns of vulgarity, vice and crime. It also presented the manners and morals of the underworld of Chicago, the glorification of crooks and Gangsters, and a debased form of speech which was becoming common usage among the youth of the country.