Thoughts In Wartime

Dominion, Volume 33, Issue 141, 9 March 1940, Page 15

Thoughts In Wartime

“It is clear,” says the “Manchester Guardian,” “that the sort of society we shall have after the war will depend on what we do and how we think during the war. “For war breaks down the force of custom, and in this sense it is a powerful teacher. This, then, is the time for pitching our ambitions high. At this moment education is very much in the public mind. “We have spent a great deal of energy and time since the last war in considering how to check the waste of youth. Some admirable reforms have resulted. But why should we not prepare now to attack the capital weakness in our system? Why should we not declare that nothing less will satisfy us as a self-respecting society than provision for universal education up to sixteen and for part-time education up to eighteen for all who leave school at sixteen? “If we think of justice, such inequalities should fill us with anger; if we think of the tasks of our civilization, they should fill us with fear. Bacon said in his ‘Advancement of Learning” that the experience of one man's life could not furnish precedents and examples for the events of one man’s life. If, then, a man needs knowledge of human history to manage his own affairs, what is to be said of a democracy in which two-thirds of its citizens leave school at fourteen and are then left by the State to learn from life how to manage the affairs of a great nation?”