EDUCATING OUR PROFESSORS

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21544, 16 January 1932, Page 12

EDUCATING OUR PROFESSORS

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I have read Professor J. Macmillan Brown’s address to the Senate of the University of New Zealand, and for an analysis of present-day conditions and a way out I am afraid the professor is in a fog. He mentions education. Yes, but what sort of education? The cure, which the professor urges, especially hard work, has been adopted as far as the workers under their captains of industry are concerned, and because of this they are now penalised and getting wage cuts, thereby reducing their purchasing power. Hence the machine of production has had to slow up and factories are idle, shops are doing a reduced turnover, everyone is compelled to economise, thereby preventing consumption, which is the very thing necessary to revive trade and industry. What object is there in producing anything at all if we do not, alongside of this, allow our consumers sufficient purchasing power in the form of wages to buy the product their labour has produced? None whatever. The object of production surely is consumption; but under the present system of private ownership and control for profit, unless such is maintained, then goods and services, no matter how essential and necessary these may be to maintain the health and security of the people, are not gone on with. This is where the professor fails to put his finger on the canker in our social economy today, and unless our education is changed radically in the direction of production for use under a system of common ownership and control working co-operately, then there is no hope of the depression lifting. Our war debts and reparation payments and debts generally will have to be wiped out, or a huge scaling down process will have to be inaugurated, unless collapse is aimed at. Our primary producers’ largest item in costs is undoubtedly interest and mortgage rates, yet, instead of these being attacked first, they dome last. The policy of our Coalition and National Governments generally seems to be to attack those least able to bear the < strain, the wage-earners thus accentuating the position by compelling this huge army of consumers, both here and in the countries to which we export, to reduce their purchases, at a time when we want to increase them, and our unemployed are not getting nearly sufficient. This is the-market that should and must be stimulated if our country and those to which we export are to be sustained. The professor,says: “A democracy should do everything in its power to keep in abeyance or obliterate class-consciousness. For it destroyed all chance of a truly united community. And the surest way to achieve it was education, provided the system gave free passage to talent through all its stages, and that was possible only through competition, Nature’s chief method of progress.” I ask, how can so-called, do this, when the avenues of education generally are so manipulated as to endeavour to make everything show a profit balance in £ s. d.? It is the system itself working towards this objective that causes classconsciousness, and a united community is impossible as long as we have an owning class which controls all the avenues of wealth-production for private profit and another class, comprising the great majority, the wage-earners, dependent on these owners as to whether they are to get a place at all _in the scheme of things. Well, if competition is the method through which class-consciousness is to be obliterated, I think we are in for a lively time. I should prefer co-operation, and when we adopt this and all work together co-operatively for the general good of all, we shall be able to engage in some real competition, and we shall then be able to call ourselves truly civilised and will have pure food, pure clothes, pure houses, etc., instead of adulterated food, shoddy clothes, and jerry-built houses' This to me is the one and essential step we must work and aim for. It is education undoubtedly, but it is in the interests of all for its benefit, not mainly, as at present, for the privileged few. —I am, etc., P. Neieson. January 15.

(Other Letters to the Editor appear on page 14.)