NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20678, 25 September 1930, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

EDUCATIONAL METHODS. Addressing the City of London vacation course in education, Mr. H. A. L. Fisher, Warden of New College, Oxford, said:—''When we read of the importance of encouraging activity in a school, and take note of the great part which such matters as sense training and games and physical exercises, or curythmics, play in our modern educational treatisss, we may be tempted to forget that, after all, children have minds which it is the business of the teacher to train. If a school is kept in a perpetual state of bustle and activity, rushing round to the neighbouring factories, cariying out campaigns for the improvement of the public hygiene, or playiDg at shopkeeping or farming, what is to become of the meditative child, who thrives on quiet and restful incitements to thought and imagination ? A fixed habit of intellectual industry cannot be acquired in a whirlpool. That the apostles of liberty should have nothing to say in favour of examination is natural enough. Under the pressure of these instruments of torturo young people are impelled to learn a great many facts in which they are not interested and which are of no particular value to them, and consequently to waste a good deal of power. But can we do without examinations? Bad as examinations often are, there can be little doubt that they havg raised the standard of intellectual industry among the young, and that their disappearance would be followed by a marked decline in the standard of national cultivation and of national character."

INTELLECTUAL BOLSHEVISM. "The very latest of short cuts to happincss—'Do as you please'—has been tried and found wanting two thousand years ago," Sir Philip Gibbs wrote in the Sunday News recently. "Through centuries of human experience mankind long ago learnt that no society can hold together—not even one small family—without a code of law, very vexatious at times, preventing individual liberty for other advantages. That 'do as you please' gospel of the intellectual Bolshevik simply doesn't work according to all the proofs of history. Curiously enough, it leads to the supreme unhappiness of the individual, because no man can stand alone in this life. This younger school which denies tradition is denying an immense store of knowledge based upon countless experiments, an infinite variety of trial and error, and profound psychological truths known before there was any science of psychology. On the whole, I find that tho older men are more tolerant, more generous, more appreciative than the younger school, so fiercely divided into cliques and feuds, so insistent upon their intellectual superiority, so scornful of all but their own point of view. And with all this new freedom, this departure from old traditions, which they call superstition, this refusal of restraint, and this moral indiscipline, it is difficult to see any startling revelation of original genius in modern art or philosophical . thought. Whore are the giants?!'

THE ISSUE IN INDIA. . •'The movement which is shaking India to-day i 3 not, whatever the guise in which it is dressed, a typo of nationalism familiar to us in the West, but the demand for a social system widely at variance with our own ideals," says Lord Meston, in the Contemporary Review. "It is an opposition which the ordinary Englishman finds hard to understand, for it takes an infinite variety of guises. But behind all its variety stands, firm and irreconcilable, a deep-seated antagonism to all that we are trying to graft upon India, through new constitutional forms, in the way of harmonious social relations on Western lines. Our offence is not this or that political formula, but our whole democratic conception of national life. Any project •which promises to fasten that conception on India will bo fought with every available weapon—reason, unreason, polished expostulation, revolutionary violence. For what faces us in India now is nothing less than orthodox Hinduism at bay. Its power and its ingenuity are equally formidable; and we have to make up our minds whether we are to yield or to join issue. ... We on our part have two plain duties to perform. Wo have to honour Queen Victoria's promise to administer the government of India for the benefit of all our fellow-subjects resident therein; and we have to pursue the policy solemnly adopted by Parliament in 1919 of guiding India steadily toward selfgovernment within the British Empire. The scheme of the Simon Commission's report is consistent with both."

AN EXPERIMENT IN SOCIALISM. " As far as the practical application of Socialism was concerned, all belief in it was knocked clean out of me, before tho Armistice, by the conviction that there are comparatively fow people who can bo trusted to deal honestly with property held in common," says Cicely Hamilton, in describing her war experiences, in Time and Tide. "Wo are being taxed to-day not only for four years' destruction, but for four years' pilfering and extravagance. ... It was often difficult, almost impossible, to know whether you were using what you had a right to, or whether you were cheating your country and the institution you worked for. . When everything was hold in common, men and women boasted shamelessly of what they had ' scroiinged' and ' won'; it was only as the bonds of collectivism were loosened that wo ceased to pilfer and fling money about, began to aspire to our standard of prewar honesty. Then another almost terrifying memory of those days is the prevalence of the jack-in-office temperament; the pleasure in the uso of unaccustomed power over others. Half the illtemper that the war left behind it was due, I think, to the jack-in-office and his joy in assertion of authority. . . I realised why despots are often badly served; because they are jealous of intelligent servants, afraid lest they grow too important. And I saw, very clearly, why despots choose their favourites from the ranks beneath them—because of such they are not jealous. And I have watched with interest, disapproving but real, the rise and swift growth of an idle aristocracy which took pride, swollen pride, in its own haziness and looked down on those who toiled and were weary."