LISTENING TO LECTURES

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 120, 23 May 1930, Page 8

LISTENING TO LECTURES

(To the Editor.)

Sir,—Mr. H. G. Miller, of Victoria College, closed his radio "talk" last Saturday with a reference to the "deadly dullness of the New Zealand Parliament." May L suggest, Sir, that professors and lecturers of the University should remember the old saying about the moat ill another's eye and the beam in one's own. These very superior persons know so little of real life and practical affairs: they live in a little artificial world of their own, us secluded as' nuns in a convent. But surely they are the last persons who should talk of "deadly dullness" in others; for could auythiug in the world be duller, more dreary, less hicid, or more badly delivered and expressed than the average University lecture? Yet now we see a move to compel everyone who wants a I degre^ to listen for unending hours to these lectures—or go without his degree. In order to force more students to attend lectures, the professors are trying to abolish the system under which "external students" may take degrees. True, the exempted student may learn far more by two hours' reading than, by twenty hours' of listening to lectures.' But the professors tell us that nobody, however widely and deeply he has studied privately, and however well he may pass all the exams. —nobody can be described as "educated" and entitled to a degree uuless lie has suffered a certain number of lectures. It is to be hoped that our "deadly dull" Parliament and "deadly dull" Press, and "deadly, dull" public, will frustrate this attempt to force all aspirants for degrees, to suffer deadly dull lectures.—l am, etc., V.U.C.