RANDOM REMINDER

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31942, 20 March 1969, Page 19

RANDOM REMINDER

THE UNSPOKEN WORD

New Zealand used to take particular pride in the lead it gave the world on women suffrage, social security services, and Rugby football. It is gratifying to discover that we are away ahead of the rest in another field. A London psychiatrist has come out with the announcement that parents should allow their children to swear because if a child’s capacity to “ver-

balise” anger by swearing is repressed, the child may be forced to act out that anger. The psychiatrist was expressing his views in the magazine of the Advisory Centre for Education, so there is every probability that this forward move will be taken up overseas. The fact that New Zealand already has a word or two start in this development should not lead to complacence. We’ve got to give the little B’s a proper

chance. Clearly, swearing in the classroom will have to be allowed as soon as the Education Department can print a suitably expensive text-book, and it might even, with advantage, be included in the b. university curriculum, because they seem to do every other b. thing there. But would it come under the languages department, English, psychology, or what. Suppose there be another b. row about that