Evening Post SATURDAY, JULY 30, 1938. SCHOOL FOR DEMOCRACY

Evening Post, Volume CXXVI, Issue 26, 30 July 1938, Page 8

Evening Post SATURDAY, JULY 30, 1938. SCHOOL FOR DEMOCRACY

There is no need to remind the thoughtful citizen of the difficulties of the day. In the news he is confronted with problems at home and abroad which seem to grow -worse instead of better and defy any solution which he can understand and i accept. He is perforce compelled to trust to the guidance of leaders in whom he may not have complete faith or whose methods he may frankly disapprove. In every direction the old order in which the citizen found at least a reasonable measure of security is changing at a rate and in a manner that leave him baffled and adrift in a troubled sea. To make the world "safe for democracy" democracy fought desperately and won the Great War of twenty years ago; today democracy seems never less Safe and world peace is maintained, in the presence of regional wars, only by expedients that appear to the citizen almost as desperate as those of war. In this "disintegration of world economy," as it has been called by Dr. M. J. Boun, of the London School of Economics, in his latest work, "The Crumbling of Empire," there is a specific threat to the Commonwealth of British Nations of which New Zealand forms a part.

When dissatisfied nations, says the author, are arming and, what is more dangerous, preparing for a clash by organising the State economically and spiritually on a war basis, the pacifist countries have no alternative but to spend their treasure on adequate equipment. . . . Temporary appeasement by unconditional concessions may offer an excellent chance for gaining time. It will make an ultimate clash almost inevitable. No policy has ever been discarded which has been' found fruitful of results and congenial to the temper of those pursuing it. The longer the period over which aggressive methods have been successful, the greater the certainty that they will be continued.

In surveying statements like this —and there is no lack of them in the multitude of books and articles on current history—the average citizen, as a comparative layman in such matters, is at a loss whether to accept outright so positive an expression of opinion, or to adopt a sceptical and critical attitude. He is well aware that much that appears in print from overseas or comes via the broadcast is rather interested propaganda than a disinterested effort at truth, and yet he hardly feels com-j petent to decide which in the case in point. As an average citizen he has not normally made a study of such matters, and yet as one of the people, a member of &. democracy, he may be called on to decide vital issues raised in reality by the play of world forces few, even of his leaders, understand. It is this pardonable, but perilous, gap in the equipment of citizenship that Dr. J. C. Beaglehole, of Victoria University College, discusses admirably in his pamphlet, "A School of Political Studies," lately issued by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. This plea for the organised study of political science as part of the training, not only of the public servant but of the citizen himself, originated in the recent establishment of an Institute of Public Administration, with the stated object among others, of improving the education of members of the Public Service. This led to the request for suitable tuition in the subject, and the Government agreed to make an annual grant of £2000 for the purpose. The Victoria College Council agreed to set up a new department, with a new professor, to do the work. Dr. Beaglehole would go much further. He suggests a school of political studies, covering the problems of public administration, but also meeting the needs, of the citizen in the problems he has to face in his capacity as an active member of a democracy. To educate the public servant is only half the problem.

In the society towards which we seem to be moving in New Zealand, political success will depend not merely on the wisdom, sympathy, and imagination of the administrator, but on the extent to which those qualities are diffused among the people Whose corporate affairs are administered— among the community at large. ... It is a problem different from that solved so repeatedly, with such startling and terrifying success, by the masters of mass-propaganda in modern dictatorships; it is not merely a job for the shock-tactics, the mean psychological skill, of the publicity agent. Democracy cannot exist without emotion; but if it is to be more than a political sham, neither can it exist without a hard core of reason, a centre of tough and continuous thought, a source or a reflection of light without too much heat. '

In training for citizenship little has been done in New Zealand so far by the University or any other educational institution. Dr. Beaglehole

considers that the "nearest approximation" to the "school" he envisages is to be found in the courses carried on by the W.E.A. New Zealand has nothing like the London School of Economics and Political Science. "What a School could perhaps give," says the author, "is what one may be pardoned for thinking a chief need of New Zealand in our day, a real political culture, in which civil servant and citizen could and should, up to a point, share equally." What is not wanted, he adds, is "a great democracy of examinees." In sketching out a plan, Dr. Beaglehole insists on the importance of research, which he considers should be carried out not so much by a Government Department like the Social Science Research Bureau, as by an independent University School. The reason given is this:

In subtle ways, social research bypermanent paid members of a government service is never quite safe. For, apart from the objectiyity of the professional statistician, inquiry in the social sciences—or rather, the interpretation of the results of such inquiry —is open more than most spheres of research to the subjective play of forces, the conditioning of the investigator's own mind. ... I take it (he says later), that the School would function in an atmosphere of utter intellectual freedom.

Of the value of such a School of Political Studies, both for the civil servant and for the citizen generally, there can hardly be any question. Such an institution might also help to transform the University itself and its methods which, in the past, may have led to a "democracy of examinees," but hardly to the production of citizenship on the quality of which in the long run real, effective, and lasting democracy depends. While New Zealand's problems are still mainly internal, there can be no "insulation" in politics from the movements of the outside world so menacing to the security of all, and the study of world-politics might well be added to the course Dr. Beaglehole proposes. The world cannot be "made safe for democracy" unless democracy is trained in mind as well as body.