The Press FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1949. Care for the Best

Press, Volume LXXXV, Issue 25738, 25 February 1949, Page 6

The Press FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 25, 1949. Care for the Best

Within 24 hours New Zealanders have twice again been warned that they are not careful enough, in their education system, to find the best brains and give them the opportunity thejdeserve—the best. Mr P. H. B. Lyon, whose recent visit and many wise and friendly words then will not have been forgotten, has told a Liverpool newspaper of some faults that he found in the system, among them the fault of a practice—which stultifies the honest democratic principle that generated it—too indifferent to the value of high and special capacity and the need to cultivate it. The Minister of Education has himself confessed the truth of this and, in his last report, had something to say about an experiment designed to discover what could be done to' speed the progress of pupils better than the average—to speed it, of course, not beyond but up to the pace at which their faculties need to be exercised. The experiment sounded a little timid; it is to be hoped that courage and enthusiasm will be gathered to it. It is, after all, an experiment to recover a kind of energy and aim that education has, in pursuing certain reforms, obscured temporarily rather than renounced; and the way to recovery should not be hard to find. But it needs to be sought with conviction. Dr. H. E. Gregory, on the other hand, was not looking at the schools but at the University, where he will have whole-hearted applause. It would be better, perhaps, if he were half as warmly applauded among the politicians and among the voters who in the end make the academic establishment what they want it to be—and what they deserve. It may be that Dr. Gregory does not know how much the University has gained, in fact and in principle, in the last few years: in fact, for eSample, a considerably improved staffing basis, and some assent to the principle that it should be even more liberally staffed when it can accommodate more staff. In addition, the University’s scale of salaries has been considerably advanced and capital and maintenance grants increased. But the facts remain, nevertheless, very much as Dr. Gregory described them, the essential fact-being that the professor and the lecturer are too stiffly bound to a teaching routine, too little encouraged and enabled to make themselves and keep themselves leaders in the march of scholarship and science. They see, if they like to take long views, a better prospect opening. Meantime, their chance of doing first-class, original work in New Zealand is heavily and dangerously restricted. It is refreshing to hear Dr. Gregory say, as his New Zealand colleagues will generally (though not without making serious exceptions) agree with him, that this is why firstclass men hesitate to come to New Zealand and first-class men are impelled to leave—this and not any great' disparity between most New Zealand ggademic posts and comparabie .posts .oversea. Dr. Gregory’s warning means nothing to the country, of course, until it is realised that the professor’s and the lecturer’s chance of doing first-class original work cannot be dangerously restricted without dangerously restricting .New Zealand’s chance of doing first-class original work as a nation. Failure to value and empower the best at the highest educational level does not work itself out at the professor’s sole expense; it works itself out, in the end, at everybody eise’s.