Professor Attacks N.Z. “Vice Of Self-Seeking”

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28532, 11 March 1958, Page 9

Professor Attacks N.Z. “Vice Of Self-Seeking”

(New Zealand Prt

ess Association)

AUCKLAND, March 10. “New Zealand’s foes are plain enough. They are not communism and the ill-will of the alien. They are our own vices, selfseeking and the abandonment of old faiths,” Dr. E. M. Blaiklock, Professor of Classics at Auckland University, told the Auckland district Rotary conference. Dr. Blaiklock said that seldom had an appeal to mere self-in-terest and cupidity been so widespread as during the November General Election. “And I speak of no one party, but of all three,” he said. “It may be fairly asked whether a country can be strong or happy, indeed, whether it can be justly governed, when a major factor in people’s choice of its representatives and lawmakers is pure self-interest and the frank determination to profit at the expense of one’s fellow countrymen.”

A nation was sick when this desire became vocal and unashamed. he said. There was also too much evidence of jealousy

in the public life of the nation. “It seeps, for example, under other names and down the channels of pernicious theories, into our educational system, where leading authorities are all for the abolition of school prizes and competition, lest the more poorly endowed and the less energetic become aware of a disadvantage and fret. “Such nonsense forgets the social loss involved in denying excellence the right to become self-conscious and to lead,” said Professor Blaiklock. There had been a prime example of it only last month in the proposed form of report out before the teachers, he said. No failing was to be mentioned. “Public opinion, vocal for once in this placid community, seems to have disposed of this absurdity, or more likely, to have driven it underground.” But no-one dared to suggest the elimination of competition in sport. Those who were so sensitive about the mental agonies of

the child who saw another outstrip him at arithmetic—“or what passes for arithmetic in the attenuated syllabus of the day”— cared nothing for the mental stress of a child beaten in a race. “They will even stand for the inexcusable tyranny of compulsory sport, though the notion of a compulsory foreign language would give them apoplexy. I cannot see the difference. The boy at the top of the class may owe his excellence to an extra millimetre on his cerebral arteries. The mighty of school sports owes his excellence to a slightly superior nervous reticulation of his calves or a few extra fibres of meat in his thighs. “Let us treat the twin imposters just the same,” said Dr. Blaiklock. “But brains are what will ultimately serve, and maybe save us,” he said. “Jealousy lies behind the system I condemn.”