A Sense of Values

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 109, 1 February 1930, Page 19

A Sense of Values

If 'teachers could somehow make ordinary boys and girls grasp the quite simple fact that, though the world may seem to offer nothing better than a little money and a great deal of work, any one of them can, if he or she will, have a life full of downright, delectable pleasure#; if teachers could make them realise that the delight of being alone in a bed-sittingroom with an alert, well-trained, and well-stocked mind and a book is greater than that of owning yachts and racehorses, and that the thrill of a great picture or a quartet by Mozart is keener (and it is an honest sensualist who says it) than that of the first sip of a glass off champagne—if the teachers could do this, the teachers, I think, would have solved the central problem of humanity. I cannot solve it. I can but say that the only people who possess the key to this palace of pleasures are the people who know how to value art and thought for their own sakes and knowledge as an instrument of culture. —Clive Bell (‘ Civilisation”).