USE OF LEISURE HOURS

Manawatu Times, Volume XLIX, Issue 3249, 20 January 1926, Page 10

USE OF LEISURE HOURS

Good advice as to the use of leisure hours is given to workers in an article by Mr. J. R. Clynes, M.P. He says:— “The worker will lose the greatest gifts of leisure if he spends the whole of his resting time merely in pleasure recreations, sports, entertainments, or the social joy of life. These must have their place. But to sacrifice all study to these other attractions Is to make a lamentable mistake and to forfeit the prospect of that degree of Improvement in the mentality of the worker which reduced hours of labour should help to secure, ?tudy may.be followed upon many different lines, and urging it I am not thinking of requiring everybody, say, to study politics, economics, or the history of national developement. A score of Other lines of study may serve in the making of a better main as- well as these. The great thing is to awaken some definite interest and after it is aroused energetically t(5 strive to fill in some allotted time in a manner to enlarge the intellectual interests and create some quite definite object to be followed with the devotion of a cause. No system and no expense can produce individual Improvement without individual Interest and exertion. The community can be elevated only In the degree of persona! .elevation, and no matter how much the State may do in providing costly facilities for elementary and secondary school education the benflts of that education cannot be enjoyed in full unless they are carried forward to the more mature years of manhood and womanhood, and unless the personal interests of large masses of people are awakened and followed upon student lines.”