REAL EDUCATION

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 2 December 1930, Page 2

REAL EDUCATION

"Knowledge is not in itself a good. It is good or bad according to its subject or its use," said Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, Chancellor of the University of Birmingham, in an address at the jubilee celebrations of the university. "It is an instrument and, like other instruments, may be put to beneficial or pernicious purposes. To put knowledge into the hand of a bad man or woman is merely to increase his or her power to do harm. That leads us back to the old proposition that it is character which counts, and no education is worth its name unless it seeks to produce a strong and healthy character. For that there is no formula. The teaching of languages, of art, of science, by itself will not compass the end in view. Something higher and deeper than that is required, something which cannot be learned by books or lectures, something which by example perhaps or by some other emotional process will call out from the hidden depths of their nature those qualities without which good citizenship is impossible, and which in their highest expression change common men into saints or heroes."