EDUCATION IN EUROPE

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LXIV, Issue 19374, 12 July 1937, Page 4

EDUCATION IN EUROPE

TOTALITARIAN STATES POLITICAL CONTROL AUSTRIAN LEADER’S VIEW (Special to the Herald.) AUCKLAND, this day. Teachers and others who have enrolled for the New Education Fellowship Conference in Auckland are expecting to gain much interesting information from the addresses of Dr. Paul Dengler, Vienna, upon educational trends and youth movements on the Continent of Europe. This is possibly the first occasion on which a Continental educationist has visited New Zealand for the purpose of lecturing.

Dr. Dengler is singularly well-fitted for the task, since his work brings him into close contact with the., English-speaking world. For the past 12 years, Dr. Dengler has been director of the Austro-American Institute of Education, Vienna, which he established, and conducts with funds provided by the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.

Describing the institute's work in an interview, he said it existed for academic interchange between Austria and < English-speaking' countries," including not only the British Empire and the United States, but also China, Japan, and other lands which used English as their principal auxiliary language.

The institute performed a wide variety of services. It assisted the ' exchange of students between Austrian universities and those in other countries and occasionally exchanges of professors, it organised programmes of lectures by visiting authorities on all kinds of subjects, maintained a library on academic inter-relations and conducted a summer course in connection with the University of Vienna for better understanding of political, social and economic conditions in Central Europe. ,

This course was in the English language. The institute was also a centre for English-speaking visitors, who went to Vienna for purposes of inquiry or study.

In a brief reference to the educational situation in Europe, Dr. Dengler said that everywhere there was change and experiment. In totalitarian countries education was rigidly controlled by the State for political ends. Control began with the mother’s health before the child tvas born,' land continued through infancy, childhood and adolescence to the' university and beyond.

There was much good in totalitarian education, particularly so far as * it was directed toward a better national physique, but it had a determined bias to certain ends. There was no opportunity for leadership to emerge. Naturally everything was dictated from above. With these and some other reservations it could be said that new and enlightened methods were being pursued under dictatorships!, just as they were under democracy. , V. .

The same was true of youth movements. These had sprung up all over Europe in l the brief democratic period after the Great War. .Some were progressing much in their original way, but those in totalitarian States had been reshaped to the will of v the rulers. There was no more talk of “education for leisure. Every young man and woman was kept* fully occupied and was being moulded as far as possible to the pattern that the State decreed.