NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXI, Issue 21905, 14 September 1934, Page 10

NOTES AND COMMENTS

EDUCATION OR CATASTROPHE In his address on education for democracy at the Liberal Summer School held at Oxford, Sir Ernest Simon made a vigorous attack on the shortcomings of school and university in the matter of education for citizenship. A race between education and catastrophe was how he described the crisis in the world to-day. Hitler, he imagined, was simply a badly educated man. Intellectually he did not seem to have a good education, and morally they saw that sentiments hopelessly wrong had been inculcated into him by his teachers and his environment. Speaking of modern education, Sir Ernest said that it had concentrated too much on vocation and culture rather than on citizenship. At Manchester University, one of the best of the provincial universities, people came up to the university with the one idea in their minds of equipping themselves to make a better living than they would if they had not gone to the university. In Oxford thero was a remarkable collection of the best leaders of thought on questions of citizenship, but he wondered how many students of Oxford wont down with any real knowledge of modern affairs He had come to the conclusion that about twenty per cent of the students of Oxford went -down with some real interest in affairs of the modern world. Sir Ernest confessed that he could not understand money problems, though he belonged to the Economic Advisory Council and heard them frequently debated by pundits. Only a handful of members of Parliament, ho felt sure, understood them, and not more than two or three Cabinet Ministers.

CIVIC EDUCATION Sir Ernest Simon's paper provoked a lively discussion, in which Sir Arthur Salter took part. He agreed that it was of the greatest importance to have civic education in elementary and secondary schools. That was to the benefit of posterity. In the meantime they had to go through the danger of the years immediately ahead, and that meant adult education. He would like to see the apparatus at the disposal of the Government, including the 8.8.C., used for education. Far more important than the schools were the conditions in which men worked. One great evil of the press was that it had added to the ignorance of the masses an arrogance they had never possessed before. The electoral body a quarter of a century ago did consider it an advantage to be represented by an Asquith, and now they did not. Sir Arthur concluded with the words that he would like to see it impossible for any one to get a university degree, particularly an honours degree, unless he had added to a specialised knowledge of his subject a framework of elementary general knowledge. LEAGUE WITHOUT RELIGION The Bishop of Guildford, speaking at an open-air service held in the ruins of Waverley Abbey, Farnham, Surrey, said that the world was in terrible danger because no nation had any sense of security. "The dear old League of Nations" blundered on without any religion. It had no belief in God and therefore he could not find in it champioift for peace and goodwill and security and order. So long as we kept our present ideas about the League of Nations we should not get far. "Cannot we sink our little tiny differences, because they are small differences compared with the greatness of the peril that besets us?" continued the bishop. "Cannot the Church in all parts of the world, our brethren of the Nonconformist churches, of the Greek Church, and of the Roman Catholic Church, come together and manifest the fact that they are sons and daughters of God? Do you think that after two years or even 12 months, if a great union of Christian people said, 'That is the line we are going to take,' that things would not be much better than they are now? What is the good of being Christians in name when'in deed and in truth our outlook on life recognises no power of God at work and no relations between us and him? You can no more settle the terrible problems which divide nation from nation by the cleverness of statesmen than you can stamp out a great disease by neglect of science and hoping that if you sit still long enough it will disappear."

ENGLISH POPULATION "What is the advantage of having more people than can be kept on a reasonably good living?" asked Sir Charles Close, addressing census experts at the International Congress on Anthropology and Ethnology in London. Sir Charles was presenting, in the section dealing with demography and population problems, a comparison of the census of England and Wales in 1931 with that of 1921. He pointed out that the war upset the trend of population very materially, first by the number of young men killed, next by the loss of their probable children, next by the economic difficulties, which had a direct effect upon the birth rate, and finally by the ultimate and serious reduction in the rate of emigration. One of the most interesting statistical results was that the proportion of women to men was slightly reduced. The average ago of the population of England and Wales, which in 1921 was 30.6, became in 1931 32.7. "This represents a very considerable ageing," said Sir Charles. "Between the ages of 0 and 20 there were actually fewer people in 1931 than there were in 1921. This state of affairs, which is naturally duo to the fall in the birth rate in recent years, will no doubt in a few years result in a stationary population and therefore in a declining one. There are those who are inclined to mako a great fuss about this probability of a decline in our numbers. I am not one of them. Our previous largo increases were due to our flourishing overseas trade; this will probably never roach its former magnitude, and if that is the case this country certainly cannot Bupport the huge population that was being built up in pre-war days. It is sometimes forgotten that England is at present the most densely populated large country in the entire world, having something like 740 persons to the square mile. What 'is the advantage of having more people than can be kept on a reasonably good standard of life? Ultimately we cannot escape from arithmetic. There is a number which can be supported unaided by our internal resources; we can add to this the number which can be supported by our exports of coal, iron, cotton, and manufactured goods, and that number will be less than in the past. We need not weep over a probable decline in our number!."