CULTIVATING TASTE.

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 3081, 19 April 1927, Page 4

CULTIVATING TASTE.

Supply grown people with what you considered the best music, the best art, the best educational food for the mind, somewhere else they would be supplied with what you considered worse, if not the worst. We could not prevent it, for it was one of the changed conditions of modern life. And he did not think he would wish to prevent it, said Sir Henry A. Miers, ex-Vice-Chancellor of Manchester University, in a recent speech. To be able to select the good from the worse is better for us than to receive passively the good c'aosen for us. And, moreover, it was our own judgment that we should learn to exercise, not the judgment of the recognised authorities or of our superiors, j Further, we had to learn to revise our [judgments in the light of our own experience and not that of someone else. |So he was disposed to conclude that with children and with grown people I alike the right course was to give wide access to both the good and the worse, and to teach them not to accept our opinion but to cultivate their own judgment. Force them, if you liked, to range as widely as possible over the good and the worse, but let that be the only compulsion. Was this not equally desirable in entertainment, in travel, in reading, in all the sources of information and experience that are available to us? Give the wide choice and encourage the exercise and training of judgment.