NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXV, Issue 19947, 16 May 1928, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

THE FUNCTION OF EDUCATION. "One hears or reads that education Is a 'great leveller.' Perhaps it would not be easy to imagine a statement more completely the reverse of the truth," said Lord Hewart, the Lord Chief Justice, in an address at the Mansion House. "Education is, of course, the great discriminator. There is nothing like it for bringing to light, and assessing, the essential inequality between one mind and another. You might, indeed, suppose, from some of the panegyrics and many of the jeremiads which are written about education, that it is a magical kind of petrol, and that, if you could only buy enough of it, you might produce an unbroken series of uniform results by pouring an equal quantity of it into every juvenile mind. But petrol will not do that even for a motor-car. Something will always depend, for example. ort the horse-power of the engine, and tho question, 'What opportunities of education are in this case open?' must always be accompanied or preceded by the question, 'What capacity for being educated does this mind exhibit ?' Again, you hear people saying that what is really wanted is an enormous development of technical instruction. Those who preach this gospel seem perhaps to desire not so much a body of educated persons as an army of trained apprentices. . . . Yet, if there is education for life, there is also education for livelihood, and there is no insurmountable reason why something at least of the method and the temper which ought to inspire the one should not also add a grace to the other. Nor should we ever forget that the true function of education is to teach us how to learn, that the process ends neither with youth nor with middle age, but ought to continue through every year of our lives, and that, when all grateful homage has been paid to schools and colleges, to teachers and to books, no small part of a man's education is that which ho gives himself."

VOTES FOR WOMEN. Closing the debate on the second reading of the Equal Franchise Bill in the House of Commons, Mr. Baldwin remarked that the bill was accepted with enthusiasm in some quarters, with tolerance in others, possibly with indifference here and there, but with very little real and substantial opposition. The reason was that the minds and hearts of the people were fitted for the completo enfranchisement of women by the experience of the War. To those who saw the part which women played in the War there seemed something almost ridiculous in refusing their claim to equal citizenship. Mr. Baldwin added that he was not alarmed at the numerical preponderance of women. He thought it was a complete fallacy to suppose that they would vote by class or sex. They would bo divided exactly as men were. There had been a unity among women which had been evoked by the struggle to obtain elementary rights, but when they had obtained those rights that unity would be gone and they would judge of political affairs according to their temperament and experience in exactly the same way as men did. With the complete enfranchisement of women ho thought there would come a rational companionship in working together between men and women for the betterment of their own country. Once this bill was law the last fraction of truth about inequality would have gone for ever. Women would have with men the fullest rights. But they would find that hard as was the struggle to attain freedom, the right use of that freedom to attain their ideals would be harder still. The attainment of an ideal was often the beginning of disillusion, and they must look at fresh horizons as they came, and make for fresh ideals.