NOTES AND COMMENTS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22457, 29 June 1936, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS

TEACHING THE CHILD

"Putting it a little too sharply, for clearness sake," said Dr. Temple, Archbishop of York, in a recent speech, " I think one might say in the period up to the war the prevalent notion of a teacher was that he or she taught a subject. Now everybody puts in the first place the child that is to learn. You are not going to teach arithmetic, but to teach John or James. If the main object is to teach tho person rather than a subject, wo have to realise that education cannot bo neutral on tho point of religion. If you do not teach with tho suggestion that the world in which wo live, and in which in our educational periods wo are to study, is God's world, then you are teaching tho child without reference to God. Even if you have your religious periods, your education as a whole is then atheistic."

DEMOCRACY AND THE PRESS

"Whatever the faults of democracy," said Mr. Arthur Grime, president of the British Newspaper Society, in a recent speech, " tliero is no substitute for its liberty of speech and thought. In resisting every threat to tho liberty of tho people and the press, wherever it may show itself, wo shall not merely be safeguarding a vast industry, tho employment and tho homes of its workers, and the prosperity of those engaged in it. That is important enough, but it is not all. 'Wo must be free or die who speak tho tongue that Shakospeare spake; tho faith and morals hold that Milton held.' Indeed, the charter of the modern newspaperman might well bo expressed in the words'of Voltaire: f I do not agree with a word that you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.' " DRIED GRASS " The ipethods of grassland farming that have held tho field for tho last 150 years are obsolete and fatuous to boot," said Professor It. G. Stapledon in a recent address. " The truth is that we have never lived in such exciting times for farmers, and perhaps the healthiest sign is that to-day farmers are beginning to be pioneers for themselves. I want every farmer in Great Britain to dry grass, for the game is not only extraordinarily interesting, but it is the most sane and sensible proposition that has ever been put before the farmer." On the economics of the new process Professor Scott Watson has said:—" One ton of dried grass has twice-the nutritive value of a ton of average quality hay, worth at present prices about £6 10s. With ordinary summer rainfall and fairly liberal manuring, yields 'of about three tons per acre of dried grass can be obtained on good land, or a gross output of food worth £lB to £l9 per acre—something far above our old ideas " THE "LAD 0' PAIRTS" "To what is due the restlessness of the Scot?" asks Lord Alness, writing in the Evening News, London. "I believe the answer is to be found in one word—ambition. With Lord Tweedsmuir in Canada, Lord Gowrie in Australia, Sir Arthur Wauchope in Palestine, and Lord Linlithgow in India, it must be admitted that the Scot has achieved at least his share in the proconsulships of the Empire But London is the spreahead of the Scottish invasion. I am credibly informed that there are 25 pages of Macs in the London Telephone Directory, and my informant unkindly suggested a direct connection between that fact and the cheap evening telephone calls! If you visit a fishing village in the South of England you will find many fishermen whose fathers and grandfathers were fishermen before them, and who are themselves well content to pursue that calling. If, on the other hand, you have speech with a fisherman or crofter in Lewis or Skye, say, you will probably find that he has a son who is a doctor or a clergyman or a lawyer 'in the South.' There is something fine about that —particularly when one visualises the stinting and saving, and even privation, endured by thoso who remain at home in order to give the 'lad o' pairts' an education and a career."

MINERS' MUSICAL FESTIVAL

"The most remarkable musical festival of modern times has just ended here. For three days tho men and women of the mining valleys of South Wales —perhaps the most painfully distressed area in the land—have lightened their adversity by tho solace of great music, in the time-honoured tradition of Wales," said Mr. Stephen Williams, music critic of the Evening Standard, writing from Mountain Ash. "They have sung Bach's 'Gloria in Excclsis,' Verdi's 'Requiem,' and Mendelssohn's 'Elijah' from copies paid for in many cases by a sacrifice of the bare necessities of life. They have bought their seats in instalments of a penny a week. For three days they have stretched gaily-coloured flags and streamers across the narrow streets of tliis drab little town, sot amid blackened hills and surrounded by tho grim machinery of pitheads; streamers which drooped in a downpour of rain, and whose' pitiful finery only emphasised tho tale told by the idle shops and empty hotels, and by tho groups of men lounging on the kerb and staring dully at things 1 could not see. I stood in the vast brick and timber pavilion, while the mists crouched on the summits of the hills and the rain beat on the roof, and I heard the choir of 1100 voices burst forth into the first chorus of 'Elijah.' Nearly all tho men were miners. Three-quarters of them were unemployed; some had been unemployed for 10 years. The festival authorities had made no rule in the matter of dress, yet every woman there would have been ashamed to sing in anything hut white, however bitter the sacrifice it cost her. 'Help, Lord 1' they sang; 'Wilt Thou quite destroy us? The harvest now is over, the summer days are gone, and yet no power cometh to help us. . . . The suckling's tongue now clcaveth for thirst to his mouth; the infant children ask for bread, and there is no one breaketh it to feed them!' They were not singing any longer: they were praying. It was their own prayer, and it came from their hearts. 1 have heard that chorus innumerable times, but 1 never really understood it till that moment."