GIRL GUIDE NOTES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22716, 31 October 1935, Page 17

GIRL GUIDE NOTES

By Guideb.

PHYLLIS CHEESEMAN CUP. The competition for this cup will be held on November 16, in the Guide Rooms, at 2 p.m. Candidates will bring with them ambulance equipment such as splints, bandages and also pen and ink. CAMPING. This is the season when talk of summer camps is in the air. Some captains will be having their first camps', and these as well as others would be glad of the help of Rangers with campevaft badge as assistants. Any Rangers who could help in this way are asked to hand in their names to Miss Hay, stating what time of the year they would be prepared to go. If there are Guides very anxious to go to camp but whose captains have not a licence to take them, will the captains concerned also communicate with Miss Hay, and an attempt will be made to place them. DOMINION CAMP TRAINING. Any licensed campers who would like further training through attending this camp at Marton at the end of January are askefl to send in their names to Miss Hay by November 8. The opportunity offered is an excellent one. LET US EDUCATE OUR HANDS. Do you remember Barrie's play "The Admirable Crichton," in which an earl's family, stranded on a desert island, becomes dependent for its subsistence, for its very existence even, on the butler, the only one of the party who knows how to use his hands 1 We are all a little like that aristocratic family. In this year of grace 1935 how many of us would be capable of distinguishing .edible plants from poisonous ones, of fashioning tools, of building a hut? In this respect we are inferior to men of quality of the old regime. They had a closer acquaintance with Nature than we have —they had received a more comprehensive education. In olden days children were cultivated; now they are forced, and the forcing process is concentrated on one organ only, the brain, and one faculty of that organ, the memory. Under the competitive system teachers cram their pupils' meihories till they burst; if many of them fall by the way so much the better, for this will reduce the lucky ones, who still believe that examination certificates will lead them to the heights, whereas it would be closer to the truth to say that the absence of examination certificates will lead them nowhere. Study courses have become alarming. There is a saying that, seeing how many virtues are expected of servants, very few masters would be qualified to be valets; seeing what schools to-day expect of their pupils, we wonder how many parents would be capable of being children. On to these wretched children, insufficiently protected by Scouting, is directed from morning to night a stream of ideas, figures, diagrams, formulae, dates, behind which there is no tangible fact, no concrete object which can be scrutinised, savoured, handled. The child is submerged in a flood of abstractions. He studies botany, mechanics, electricity—but can he change a fuse, drive in a nail, plant a potato? What is done to train his hands? Pace etymology, nothing is more remote from the hands than a handbook. And yet, as Helvetius said, if a man had had a hoof instead of a hand progress could never have existed. These scholastic excesses used to have a corrective —family life, which plunged the child back into reality. He saw his mother busy with household duties, he saw his father working in the garden, he saw both of them making, mending, patching, and he used to help them. Now the maid-of-all-work does all the work, and the plumber is on the telephone. It is not so long since there was a conscious bond between man and his tools. He knew how they were made, how they were broken, how they were mended. To-day, like the farmers of America, we only know how to break them; we depend on others to repair them. The abuses of the machine age are such that in England the women have deserted their saucepans, and even in the depths of the country a tin of food is opened just before each meal In France the young girls "with fciry fingers" are nothing but a memory, far off and faintly ridiculous. We bless the gramophone for having delivered us from the five-finger exercises of young ladies who no longer play the piano. The writer whose pen used to "fly feverishly over the paper" now dictates to a stenographer, and the material link which is used to connect thought with its material expression is broken. We have given up the two great sports of our fathers, fencing and horsemanship, which, depended on the suppleness, the quickness, the lightness of hand, and wo have gone in for football, swimming, motoring, boxing. Instead of our hands we use our arms, our fists, our feet, and our eyes. Dazzled by our mechanical conquests and their corollary the over-development of muscles and memory we have not yet reacted against them, after the example of the thinkers of 1848—Ruskin, Tolstoy, and their fellows. They were (already) alive to the dangers of the machine age, and preached a return to manual labour as the' salvation of the soul. What people is more apt for this than the Frenchman? It has been repeatedly snid that he is the best craftsman in the world; it is the skill of his hands, lingering lovingly over detail, combined with the aptitude of his brain for general ideas, which has hitherto saved him on the one hand from sterile speculations, and on the other hand from soul-deadening labour. To-day we have become "stupid with our ringers " and it is time to say with Voltaire: "We must educate our hands." —By Paul Morand, in the Council Fire.