LEARNING AND LIBRARIES.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19798, 19 November 1927, Page 10

LEARNING AND LIBRARIES.

One of the penalties New Zealand pays for isolation and a comparatively short period of development is the lack of some cultural and educational facilities which are easily accessible to the studious in older countries. Professor Grant, who has occupied a chaar at Canterbury College for a year, on exchange with Professor Hight, finds one of them in the want of libraries, or deficiencies in the libraries, at institutions affiliated to the University of New Zealand. It is easily comprehensible that the absence of books, which Professor Grant has experienced, is an impossible barrier to the pursuit of what he calls a career of learning. The student whose aim is to obtain a diploma in the shortest time possible, then to pass on to a career outside the university, may find the prescribed text books, and such supplementary reading as the existent libraries afford, sufficient for his purposes. Those who look further and seek higher goals must find their ambitions thwarted or go abroad in search of the broader opportunities the Dominion cannot afford them. Whether it will be possible to draw on the surplus that Professor Grant says exists in Britain, only the future can show. The idea of making books: "links of .Empire," as they have been called before, is an appealing one. It must necessarily be a task of-delicacy to bring the needs of the Dominions before those seeking recipients for their library treasures, but, if it could bo done, the benefit to New Zealand or any other Dominion would be immense. By pointing to this deficiency and suggesting the way it might be remedied, Professor Grant has emphasised the value of the exchange system, bringing as it does experienced minds from elsewhere to examine educational facilities in the Dominion.