Appeal For Education Of Young In Civil Liberties

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29192, 30 April 1960, Page 15

Appeal For Education Of Young In Civil Liberties

A suggestion that there was an urgent need to revise the education of children at home and school so that the “classic civil liberties” were preserved was made by Mr P. H. T. Alpers in an address to the annual meeting of the Canterbury Council for Civil Liberties last evening. Mr Alpers listed the liberties “for which this and most other civil liberties organisations had always existed” as “freedom of speech and thought, the press and all means of communication, assembly and the liberty of the person.”

Mr Alpers said people were ready enough to pay lip service to these ideals in New Zealand and to let children do the same, but mere lip service was more dangerous than saying nothing about them. To speak of liberties perfunctorily, to take them for granted, was to cheapen them, whereas, now that society was becoming so much more complex, government more difficult, the world a smaller place and more beset by frictions and rivalries, there was a greater need to value and preserve liberties. “South Africa is a notable example of what happens if you don’t,” he said.

"Safe” Concepts New Zealanders distrusted the unconventional or divergent-idea and readily accepted the normal and conventional. The most highly regarded members of the community were those who had energetically and faithfully upheld the normal, safe concepts. "We accept all too timidly, both in peace and in war, restrictions upon minorities. Without a protest except from some ‘crackpots’ like this council and from the press, some shockingly restrictive emergency legislation has been passed from time to time and allowed to remain upon the statute book as permanent —legislation utterly foreign to the liberty and freedom which we flatter ourselves we uphold. That is why I say we are not in a healthy state in this respect,” he said.

"It is not at all difficult to foresee, in the .next few decades, our vaunted racial amity being put to a series of exacting tests,” Mr Alpers said. "The time to prepare for these is now, by developing the right attitude among young New Zealanders. If we wait for these testing times to arrive we will be too late, for one is struck again and again by

the fact that, for the most part, the present-day adult cannot be moved; his prejudices have too often settled upon him or, if not that, then it is pretty certain that he won’t be persuaded to 'stick his neck out’

“When, therefore, we hear, as we did at the end of last year, a chorus of headmasters and headmistresses up and down the country deploring the troublesome, unconventional, or ‘difficult’ boys and girls they have to put up with, it should be a danger signal. One quite understands that, both for parents and teachers, the rebel with an independent outlook is a nuisance and life is so much easier without him, but the alternative is to blanket the nation with the ‘pall of conformity’ as it has been aptly called.” “Dreary Uniformity” It was not an accident that New Zealand suburban architecture, clothes, furniture, such national institutions as the school jubilee and the local centennial, to mention but a few national characteristics, presented a dreary uniformity to the observer from outside. Nor was it without significance that no controversial subjects were to be discussed over the National Broadcasting Service.

“While not necessarily agreeing with everything they say, one cannot ignore the repeated comments of visiting American psychologists and sociologists that our craze for conformity and discipline in schools is unhealthy and is, at least in part, responsible for what we consider to be our youth problems,” Mr Alpers said.

“We may drift along in this way into a crisis—say. a crisis arising out of race relations—within the next few decades, and then find ourselves as powerless as liberal-minded white South Africans now are to do anything about the plight of their country. We will be too late, as they are too late. Many of their own civil liberties are already gone and they have let the civil liberties of their black fellow-country-men go altogether. “Let us treat each man’s liberty as sacred—don’t just say, ‘liberty is sacred’ and let a man rot in prison, mental hospital, or segregation in any form,” Mr Alpers said. “Let us treat men of every colour the same—don’t just say they are all the same, while treating them differently. Minority Groups

“Let the minority groups have all the meetings, processions, radio time, etc., that we can and let us have the faith that ultimately logic, truth, and human decency will prevail, whichever side they may be on. “If we ourselves adopt these attitudes in practice there is nothing surer than that our children will follow our example, but they will turn a deaf ear to our preaching that which we don’t practise. “They should be taught history in such a way that they know the other side—the brutality and horror of war, nuclear or otherwise, the shams and deceptions, the broken treaties and promises. A child should know as early as possible what communism is in theory and in practice and its comparison with the alternatives. He should not be taught either to shudder at or enthuse over it until he can do so on his own judgment later.

“None of these courses need be disruptive of discipline in home or in school but, in any case, don’t let us be too concerned about ‘discipline’, itself a dangerous word. Tolerance is the one to emphasise,” Mr Alpers said.