A GOOD EDUCATION

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 21 February 1931, Page 9

A GOOD EDUCATION

MAKING GOOD CITIZENS

“A good education is one that succeeds in making the average individual a good citizen who will play successfully the role allotted to him as a constituent member of that complicated organism the civilised community, writes Professor J. Graham Kerr in “To-day and To-morrow.” “It is one which ensures that the heritage of ‘biological capital’ —in the form of health aml strength and capacity, physical, menial and moral—received by each individual from his parents, shall he increased in amount and shall he coined into a. type of currency (such as specialised skill of one kind or another) readily negotiable in the particular individual. It will ensure that the individual member of the crowded community of Western civilisation shall realise that he owes not merely his comfort and prosperity, but his continued existence, to the community in which he lives, and that this debt has to be repaid by industry and efficiency in his particular profession or trade, by loyalty to the community and devotion to* its smooth working, and by personal subjection to its discipline. It will develop the habit of using common sense in the ordinary affairs of life and dis-courage'the-habit of mere unthinking absorption of what is heard or read.’