EDUCATION NOT ENOUGH

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 22936, 14 January 1938, Page 8

EDUCATION NOT ENOUGH

| One of the great political questions of the day perhaps the greatest, and certainly the most immediate—is thoughtfully discussed by the Chancellor in his address to the Senate of the University of New Zealand. Mr. Hanan is troubled, as many minds are troubled, as to how best individual liberty and free institutions may be preserved in an age of State regimentation, of standardisation, of mass suggestion and production of ideas and things. He, finds his answer in "an education which will guarantee a higher general standard of life and character —a higher general level of civic spirit." And he places on the people the responsibility for providing such an educational system, so as to "hold the line of their liberty and fortify their democratic system against perils to come." It is the sort of answer that one would expect from a university chancellor or from, say, humanists like Mr. 11. G. Wells and Mr. H. A. L. Fisher. Moreover it is a good answer up to a point. Yet we in New Zealand have now for over 60 years, for more than two generations, provided a system of universal education, "free, secular and compulsory." Can we assert we have achieved by or through it "a higher general standard of character" than obtained in the 'seventies or 'eighties of the last century? It may be, of course, that the teaching has not been "adequate," to use Mr. Hanan's word, and that "a little learning is a dangerous thing." Even so, many are coming to the deep conviction that education, like patriotism, is not enough ; that the cult of the mind to the neglect of the spirit is barren of those fruits of character and civic sense, individual morality and social responsibility, that are the common and clamant need of to-day. "In the beginning was the Word," but the Word was more than knowledge, being God Himself.