Education as a Cure-all

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 99, 21 January 1935, Page 11

Education as a Cure-all

Sir, —I have read with very keen interest your leading article, “Education as a Cure-all,” in your issue of January IS. Your criticism of Professor Macmillan Brown's proposition—-’’that a more generous endowment of education would rid the world of most of its problems and all of its terrors”—in which you say “the case is not so much a question of intellectual efficiency as a question of ethics, the simplest rules of which, if universally applied, would suffice to solve all problems and banish all wars,” I think, Sir, hits the nail square on the head. Education as a curative factor for our natiohal ills is indeed vain without morals, and morals are vain without religious sanctions. As an example of perverted education Germany is to-day a shocking example. Before the Great War in 1914 we were urged to admire the German universities, to fall down in worship before the German professors. They were held up to us as models of science aud of scholarship. The episode of the German professors is a dark and sinister episode in a sinister war. To read their utterances is to be transported into a world of boastfulness aud falsehood. At a bound they rid themselves of all the respect for truth which should have been their ideal. They said whatever they thought might be acceptable without reflection and without inquiry. The United States of America has probably spent more money on education than any other country. What are the results? The “World Call,” a well-known American magazine, has an article on “The Church and Higher Education,” in which it says, “Nothing is more evident in the present economic and industrial upheaval than the widespread breakdown in character. When we remember that these men and women who have proved so false to their trusts are the products of our educational system, it ought to give us pause.”—l am, etc., J.W.H. Gonvillc, January 18.