NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXX, Issue 21503, 29 May 1933, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

GROWTH OF BUREAUCRACY "I say deliberately that self-govern-ment in the true sense of the word is seriously threatened in Australia today," said Dr. Frank Louat, of the legal fraternity, at a function given in his honour in Sydney. "We have lately seen the democratic institutions of many non-British countries crashing to pieces. Ou)- own democracy is safe from this violent fate, but it is being challenged in ji more insidious manner. Tho peril arises from the fact that the main power of control of the community is passing away from Parliament and the Courts into the hands of public officials. Fully two-thirds of the laws to-day are not ir.ade by Parliament at all. They are called rules, regulations, and bj'-laws, and are made by Ministers on the advice of public departments. Nobody reads them, and few people know even where they can be seen, yet each man must obey them at his peril. Plain, ordinary citizens are becoming like babes-in-the-wood. On every hand a network of boards, commissioners, councils, and other authorities hem them in as in a jungle. This is the real Government of the people, and is not affected by the rise or fall of Ministers. Successive Governments are merely like changing clouds above a tangled jungle, which steadily keeps on growing."

"GOSPEL OF LEISURE" Discussing the subject of the leisure of the young wage-earner at a London conference of those interested in the welfare of the working boy and girl, Professor C. Delisje Burns said that in view of the advances in machinery, it was conceivable that great numbers of men and women would not be needed in 20 or 30 years' time; at any rate, they would not be needed for such long periods of work as at present. There would be a new proportion between work and leisure in the next 20 or 30 years. The change in education affected leisure intimately. Education was changing in the direction of becoming more interesting. The first difficulty with regard to leisure was the idea that somebody was going to improve it. They often heard the phrase, "The proper uses of leisure." In a sense leisure was a time for improper uses —a time for experiments and for finding one's own way. The first element of leisure which was important was that it was one's own. A pernicious view of leisure was that it was merely an interval between important areas of work. The important part of life was leisure. We had inherited a gospel of work, and it was time we had begun with the gospel of leisure. The new opportunities of loisure were opportunities for experimentation. There was the problem of people who worked for a living having the sort of leisure that only the leisured classes had enjoyed hitherto. In such a situation clubs became a crucial point in a new kind of society. Leisure might be filled with the sort of occupation that in earlier years called work. Young people could have opportunities of making things, of drawing and moving in rhythm, rather than of playing dominoes and similar games. They might make their own clubs, paint the walls and make the furniture, and thus learn that work and leisure were intertwined.

RELIGIOUS TEACHING Turning to the study of the spiritual expression of the child, in an address at an Oxford conference, the Bishop of Liverpool, formerly of Rugby, said they began with those moments when a child was observed to bo 110 longer listening to his teacher or trying to understand or remember, but was wholly absorbed in some other task which attracted and awed and fascinated him. He was giving to it freely all his powers. Tftat was an example of the child's own self, which was essentially religious, and it might be taken as the starting point in directing his self toward God. Where lay the real failing in the view of teaching religion ? Was it not that there had been imposed upon the child a response to a life which was different from his own, a life of which ho would one day have experience, but was at present from him? That was due to the assumption that a child was a miniature adult, and teachers know in their hearts that he was not. Now we were getting away from the old belief that their business was to din things into children until from very weariness they accepted them. On the other hand, he was not one of those who believed that the child could bo safely left to discover for himself all that he needed. Ho read recently in a very good novel that nothing can bo taught. All that the teachers can do is to show that there are paths. That was a very good epigram, which had as much truth in it as one could expect an epigram to have*. But the child must have light to see tho paths. Human experience of God in the past and in the present must be conveyed to the child. Otherwiso he would bo cut off from his legitimate inheritance. The mistake most people made was that they failed to see that the child was religious already. The child could not describe his religious sense just because it was the response of his own soul. Teachers could not analyse it and they had better not try. Teachers must build upon the religious sense which was already within the child.