BERNARD SHAW'S TALK.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20420, 23 November 1929, Page 15

BERNARD SHAW'S TALK.

.OXFORD. AND. CAMBRIDGE.

" RAZE THEM TO THE GROUND."

EXPRESSIONS OF DISSENT. [from our own corresfondent.l LONDON, Oct. 18. "Don't fiend your sons to Oxford or Cambridge," stated Mr. Bernard Shaw at Plymouth, when opening a residential hostel which Lord Astor has presented to the University College of the South-west. "The tiling to do with those/institutions," Mr. Shaw added, "is to raze them to tho ground and sow the foundations with salt. There are several public schools generally regarded as nurseriesfor Oxford and Cambridge, and they might share tho same fate. • If it is too much trouble to knock them down, use them as asylums for the mentally defective." Tho older universities, said Mr. Shaw, must be replaced by local universities, whose loss of the "tone" of Oxford and Cambridge would be one of their great qualities. "Many of you might think that I am an enthusiastic advocate of university education," Mr. Shaw went on to say. "I can assure you that there is nothing that I am more deeply convinced of than the fact that in England university education is destroying civilisation, and that it, has for some centuries past been making decent government and a decent life of the people impossible. "And yet there is a side of university life which on results one must approve of. There are two classes of men in this country who have good social manners—university men and sailors. It is evident, however, that a university man, by being at a university, runs the gravest injury to his intellect, and he goes out of a university almost incapable of original thought "

Replies to Mr. Shaw. Of course there are many who dissent from Mr. Shaw's opinions. The Isis (Oxford) says: "The world is so full of mediocrities that it would seem too much to hope than none of them should come here, or that once they came they would promptly be transformed from ugly ducklings into swans. Admittedly we have seen fools in plenty, but not in greater numbers than we have seen them walking up Ludgate Hill or along the parade at Bournemouth. The university suffers fools, if not gladly, at any rate politely, whether they are rich or poor, but we have never found it actually manufacturing them.

"Parents look for a miracle to be manifested on Paddmgton station, and are aggrieved when neither then nor in the succeeding months is any sign given. It does not occur to them that if the boy had spent those three years in an office, beyond earning a modest competence he would not now be really very much better off. He was a rabbit when they put him into the hut and he is still a rabbit when they take him out. Let parents be warned at the beginning of the three years, instead of being fed with a great deal of nonsense about class distinctions and dissipation at the end of it, that the process of the university is quite simply this—'To those that have shall be given, while to those that have not shall be taken away even that which they have.' "

" Shaw a Blatant Advertiser." "Shaw is a paradox and a blatant advertiser," declared the master of a prominent college at Cambridge. "Men would not come here from all over the world to attend the lectures of Thomson and Rutherford if Cambridge had nothing to teach them. I have no time to waste on Shaw, and I refuse to be drawn into any controversy." Dr. Alexander Wild, who was the Labour candidate for the university at the last election, said that no one who knew university life would take Shaw seriously. If a number of parents did take Mr. Shaw's advice and sent their sons elsewhere, it would be a welcome relief to embarrassed tutors, whose task of selecting candidates for admission from the great mass of applicants was a very difficult and delicate one.