NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21807, 23 May 1934, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

BRITAIN'S WORKERS " The industry of looking after the home is by far the largest in the country," said Professor John Hilton, of Cambridge University, in an address to the League of Industry Conference. " It employs the full time, and often the overtime, services of 10,000,000 wives and domestic workers, and if their services are reckoned in money value, the wages bill is enormous. The next biggest industry is distribution, which occupies 3,000,000 workers. Out of 18,000,000 people working for gain. 9,000,000 are engaged in productive industry, and the threo largest sections are agriculture, building and contracting, and mining and quarrying, and these take about 1,000,000 each. The other 6,000,000 are engaged in what one may loosely call manufactures, and with mining these produce everything we export. When people tell you that you will never again find employment for the whole people, I want you to think of this before you accept their statement."

CINEMA IN TEACHING "We are only just beginning to explore the cinematograph as an aid to teaching, and the more experiments we can make and the wider their area tho sooner shall wo be able to formulate some principles as to its use and some idea of the appropriate technique," said Mr. H. Ramsbotham, Parliamentary secretary to the Board of Education. "As an instrument of teaching I believe the cinematograph has immense possibilities. It may often make an appeal to children whoso interest and imagination are not easily reached by the written or spoken word. The young mind is like a photographic plate, and I believe tho deepest and clearest impressions are received by it through the eyes. Visual perception is a powerful stimulus to mental perception. We shall want from them in the future not books or lectures, but scenarios, and I can see the time coming when every university will have as an essential part of the equipment of its historical faculty a film studio." THE SCHOOL TEACHER "The teacher, more than any man, moulds the public opinion of tho future, and has it in his power to make it intelligent and wise," said Mr. J. A. Spender at a conference of school teachers. "What chiefly distinguishes an educated from an ill-educated public opinion is 'seeing things in perspective'; and education should supply for the young the standards of judgment which they should apply to the mass of material which will come before their minds in their daily lives. Is it impossible for recent history, which for the rising generation is the most important of all history, to be impartially taught to the young? The history books generally stop at the Boer War; and yet in the subsequent 35 years most portentous events have taken place, events of which some clear knowledge is imperative if our young people are to begin to understand the shattered world now in tho re-making. There are risks on either hand, risks of ignorance on thf* one side, and of getting involved in politics on the other; but of the two the risk of ignorance is far the greater. Knowledge of the comparatively simple facts will enable tho youth of to-day to compare the present with the past; to understand broadly the difference between tho idea of a balance of power which dominated a pre-war Europe, and the idea of the League of Nations, which is painfully struggling to gain a footing in tho world to-day. The good teacher is he who succeeds in planting in the minds of his pupils the idea of the good life—the life within easy reach of the vast majority to which a modest competence must, materially speaking, be the limit."

FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY In a delightful speech at the opening of an extension of tho London Library, Mr. Baldwin recalled the days of his youth, when he read, as all early readers, lying on his stomach in front of the fire. But, alas, he said, that was no longer possible. To most of them there came a kind of senile convexity which disturbed that perfect equilibrium which was necessary to that attitude to enjoy what they were reading. In those days their friends in the library were far more real to them than most of tho simulacra proved to be that they met in after life. Those present knew what a library was and what it was for. They did not feel superior in that knowledge; they merely had a happy sense that many people unfortunately were without. If they looked oaoi modern flats to-day they found that there was not only not room to swing a cat, but not room to swing a book. They did not want to be told what to read. They knew where their pasture was, and they could each seek out what best could suit their condition. He was no scholar, but catholic in his tastes, and he thought he found himself in agreement with Southey when he said: "A fastidious taste is like a squeamish appetite. One has its origin in a disease of the mind and tho other in some ailment of the stomach." When he was in a library it was no fastidious taste that was his, but ho certainly did wago war against some types of books. That day, when in tho library at tho House of Commons, ho found his gaze riveted on Volume 165 of English Cases, Ecclesiastical, Admiralty and Probate and Divorce. Ho felt then that ho was among those books to which Lovell referred when he said that it would bo a good thing in all public collections of books to have a wing set apart for works marked "Literature suited to desolate islands." But it took all sorts to make a world, and even of fiction sometimes the spirit wearied. "For us who love libraries," ho said, "and are debarred from them in the years of maturity and who have to serve in dusty walks of life, whose time is but slight to . taste .of our own , jiasturage,, may perhaps there not bo waiting some day a reunion with those friends wo love? We remember that Brer Babbit, when thrown into a briar patch by Brer Fox, shouted: 'Born and bred, in a briar patch.' So we, born and bred in libraries, hope that we may be thrown back into them. I think that, to one in mature life coming back into tho library which lias been the spiritual home of his development, such a homecoming •would present to him a mirror of his whole life."