ECONOMY AND THE UNIVERSITY

Dominion, Volume 26, Issue 97, 18 January 1933, Page 8

ECONOMY AND THE UNIVERSITY

It would have been rather surprising if the Chancellor of the University of New Zealand had omitted from his inaugural address at the annual meeting of the Senate yesterday some reference to the Government’s economies in education. In common with the primary and the secondary branches of the education system, the university has experienced a reduction of income. The attitude of the community to expenditure on education-in these difficult times is that it should be worth while. Public opinion has arrived at the conviction that much of the nations expendituie on free primary, secondary, and university education has been wasted. Political demagogues have declared that higher education should be free for all. Slogans of this kind make a direct appeal to the electorate, for thev emphasise the claims of the so-called “underdog.’ “Competition,” declares the Chancellor, “is the method of Nature to secure progress.” But the obvious result of a free-for-all system in higher education must be a dead level of mediocrity. Entrance to the secondary schools and the university should be subject to selective conditions, to be determined by some system that will separate the sheep froth the goats. From this point of view the university is the foundation of the education system. If its standards are high, those? of the secondary schopls, and. before them, the primary schools, must be correspondingly high. If they are low they will react upon the secondary and the primary schools. The effect of too much free education has been, beyond all doubt, a depreciation of the standards of efficiency, the flooding of the secondary schools and the university colleges with students of inferior calibre, and. averaged out, a resultant deterioration of our academic prestige. The question to be determined now is not the higher education of the many, but the higher education of the fit. Only on this basis can expenditure based upon equality of opportunity be justified.