“PLACES OF BEAUTY.”

Northland Age, Volume 22, Issue 14, 22 January 1923, Page 6

“PLACES OF BEAUTY.”

WHAT SCHOOLS SHOULD BE. ETHEL TURNER TALKS TO GIRLS. “What if we suddenly step forward and eirnestly advised all girls to bob their hair and substitute lessons in jazz for geography? I declare the thought appeals to me so much that I can’t resist it” (said Mrs. H. R .Curlewis (Ethel Turner) when presenting the prizes at the Church of England Girls’ Grammer School, Dulwich Hill, in the local Town Hall. “The revolutionary advice I have for you tonight is that you should take to stealing”, continued Mis. Curlewis. “I don’t want you to take much and I don’t want you to take gold, but only something more precious than gold, namely, time—if it is only half an hour every day— to develop, apart from the school routine, that something in you that I can only describe as the ‘Essential You’. “The true use of education is to draw this out of you so wisely and so skilfully that you become of real help and value to the progress of the world instead of a drag on its wheels.” “And modern education, all over the world, is realising this more and more every year. But modern education has an enormously difficult task to grapple with, a task that is often simply beyond it, because it is hampered on every hand by shortness of means. “Schools should be the finest buildings in all the country, places full of beauty and of inspiration. Teachers should be the very best minds and.hearts in the community, all paid spacious salaries so that their minds are not for ever fretted and in danger of losing their fine edges by the harassment of their private domestic life. “One of the mistakes of modern education is that in its anxiety to hand out knowledge (which is only a very poor relation of wisdom) the minds of many young people get so smothered that their own essential ego never has a chance to r se to the surface.”

‘3“Lots of men and women go through life so smothered by the ego of other people that when in odd moments they really ‘taste’ themselves—themselves as they were actually in the beginning—they get a sense of surprise and feel inclined to say with the old woman in the nursery rhyme: ‘Surely, surely this is none of ll’ “Take education—take lots of education —but don’t let the you in you be smothered by it. Steal enough time from it to develop whatever kink or bent in you you have decided is the real you,”