THE ROYAL ROAD TO PROGRESS

Otago Witness, Issue 3590, 2 January 1923, Page 23

THE ROYAL ROAD TO PROGRESS

KNOWLEDGE TESTS FOR M.P.’S. “No man should be a member of Parliament until he can give an intelligent lecture qp a candle to a set of youngsters. And no man should be a magistrate until he has invented something.” Thus Professor A. W. Bickerton, at a Botanic Gardens lecture. “Hudibras,” he remarked, “was speaking satirically when lie said, ‘lnvent a shovel and become a magistrate.’ I am in real earnest. Before a man becomes a magistrate he should show that he is in contact with the real life of his time, as exemplified by his knowledge of the action of a pump or of the valves of a steam engine. Members of Parliament, the legislators of a scientific age, ought to have some training in the basic principles of science. In the study of a candle it is astonishing how many of these fundamental yet simple principles are involved. How many M.P.’s could give that lecture intelligently ? I remember ray old teacher Huxley remarking that he hoped the time would come when the average member of Parliament would know as much of the elementary principles of science as an ordinary schoolboy. AN AGE OF SCIENCE, BUT —- “Perhaps it may be said lie does nowadays know nearly as much —not because lie has increased. hts knowledge, but because the public schoolboy has lessened his! This, of course, applies to most of our so-called educated men and leaders of thought. The strikiug difference between our age and the flourishing period of Greece,” he went on, “is entirely in the knowledge of basic principles of the universal laws of nature. It is in tlie substitution of simple, broad principles for the pedantic minutiae of details that our progress depends. “We have the accumulation of facts, and not their co-relation. If by the unification of science we were to achieve the latter, there is practically no great secret of nature that we should not be able to solve. What is the use of science if we lose 6iglit of the basic principles? There is no doubt that mistaken conceptions of human evolution were the cau33 of the Great War. Let members of Parliament and other men who influence public opinion get a thorough grounding in broad principles. Our leaders are not in touch with nature. The neglect begins in the public schools, which afford a magnificent training in the art of dominance. A boy is taught to obey implicitly those above him, and to expect implicit obedience from those below him. He is taught; also, how to find subordinates who will work for him. How much better it would be if he himself were trained to bo able in later life to test the qualities of tho man below him, which he is rarely able to do.”