NEW COUNTRIES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22631, 24 July 1935, Page 4

NEW COUNTRIES

FUNCTIONS IN EDUCATION CORRECTORS OF TRADITION IDEAL OF EMPIRE’S FUTURE

Some possible reactions back on,the world’s Greek, Roman and Hebrew cultural core of the development of new countries were discussed by Professor F. Clarke, adviser of overseas students in the University of London’s Institute of Education, in a. public address at Victoria University College last week. Professor Clarke, appointed to his post in February last, is (the Dominion says) just completing a short visit to New Zealand on which he has met educational authorities in the four main centres. His address was titled, “ Some Aspects of Education in New Countries.” The large political development of the last 20 years. Professor Clarke said, had expressed itself in the Statute of Westminster, which he regarded as a perfectly logical and inevitable development of British principles. Now that that development had reached its culmination people were asking: “What of the future?” It was his belief that the British peoples in the future would be more like a church and less like a State. They would be held together not because of the commands of an Emperor in the ’Roman sense but because of a common faith. If that were so education would become the supreme instrument of statesmanship. It was the intention to endeavour to develop in London, a kind of seminary where all those in' whose hands was placed the shaping of British citizenship might come together. NEW COUNTRIES AND THE OLD.

That which distinguished England

from all the rest of the dominions was that they were new countries and she was old. In a new land there were

certain features of profound interest and importance. Of the essential difference between old countries and new, Professor Clarke said some people held this was due to climate—a people leaving their natural habitat and going to another. But man triumphed over his environment and bent it to his purpose. The Indians in Canada had not been able to live in places which now carried cities of half a million people. It was the fact of transplantation itself which made a new country inevitably different from the old. A people whose origins were in an old land took that culture and set about implanting it in the wilderness. They opened up a new chapter of history of their own. What they produced was not an old thing but a new one of their own. It was a distinctive side of the old life that they .had brought over.

Another factor making for difference was rapid growth, what Professor Clarke called “ all-at-oneness.” The new people had to get food and housing, and put together in one generation all the things that in the old had been done in 2000 years. The result was that in some, at least, of the new countries men had got an exaggerated idea of what man could do. , BACKGROUND OF TWO HISTORIES. Dealing with the results of this, the professor said one wasl that the people were for a time under an illusion of recreation; that they were just remaking the old country. That simply could not be done. What they were making was something new. Then, there were the unconscious influences of the country; new influences that would have their way.

He rather felt that New Zealand was just beginning' to pass that phase ’and to consider what she meant in the whole. “ I can begin to see what Canada means—that there shall be two voices in North America—and in South Africa there is attempt to build a highly civilised society where black and white shall live side by side on equal terms without mixing physically. New Zealand is asking that question. When you get the answer you will be more, and not less, British,” he said. People in new countries had the advantage of the background of two histories, the one going back to Shakespeare, the Saxons, the Romans and the Bible, and the other that of their own land. “ The conflict of the two is one of the dramas of the future.” Speaking of the weaknesses of the development of new countries, Professor Clarke mentioned the tendency to overoptimism and to over-simplification, and a certain weakness of community life which was inevitable as the old community life had been broken. There was a third, noticeable especially in the United States—the tendency to mechanisation. This was due to the preoccupation with material things. INTELLECTUAL TIMIDITY. “ Dare I mention that there is very marked in new countries an intellectual timidity, a dislike for ideas,” he said, quoting a saying that the sight of an idea with its clothes off was an indecent spectacle. That conventionality must be treated with respect. One explanation of it was that in early settlement all were engaged in the task of maintaining the physical necessities of life. They had got to insist on the essentials and it was no wonder they hung 1 on to a few things that had since proved superfluous.

Coming to what he called more cheerful tendencies, the professor said that the greatest, and one which New Zealand exemplified .well, was social solidarity. Canada and South Africa had triumphed because of the motive of social solidarity. Secondly, there was the sense of an open future, which should give tolerance and spaciousness in spirit and the material. “When you stand on your head and bury yourself id the past, the only hope is an explosion.”

Thirdly, there was the experimental spirit, which was strong in New Zealand. It was also the function of new countries to be a kind of corrector of tradition. It was the function of new countries to be rational critics of tradition and pass it on to the next generation vrith a little more sense in it. Rational, free criticism- was so much easier in new countries.