TOPICS OF THE TIMES.

Southland Times, Issue 22474, 9 November 1934, Page 6

TOPICS OF THE TIMES.

Education and Life. In his address on Speech Day at Wakefield Grammar School, Dr Guy Warman, the Bishop of Manchester, asked what he called the ancient question: “What do we send our boys to school for?” Some people, he said, regarded the task of the school as akin to that of the roadside petrol station, but boys often discovered later that though their life car might be full of knowledge it would not go because of other deficiencies. He preferred the metaphor of educational ladder, with the rungs not too far apart and with none missing. Again, a few masters, more parents, and many boys mistakenly wished that ladder to be an escalator. Other people had little Jack Homer’s attitude to the opportunities of education and life, but that philosophy was a pestilential heresy. It was wrong and unscientific to spend all one’s energies extracting the plum for oneself.

The Secondary School. The proper purpose of a five years’ course in a secondary school was a preparation for citizenship and life, said Dr Cyril Norwood, late headmaster of Harrow, in an address to the British Association. Every school should have a competent doctor and a competent physical expert. Other primary needs of life were the suitable training of hand and eye and ear. To be handy was the one great asset for life which many lacked in more or less degree. To be able to recognize what was beautiful and to distinguish it from the ugly was a quality in which our civilization was somewhat lacking. “I claim that for the average boy and girl, and I mean by that 80 to 90 per cent, of our pupils,” he continued, “physical education, art, music and handicraft ought to contribute to part of their training, because it all tends to make happier, fitter and betterequipped men and women.” History and geography should form part of everybody’s education. By history he meant a considered attempt to teach each pupil how the modern world had come to take its shape. It was not intelligent to let pupils leave school with a knowledge of the Wars of the Roses and no knowledge of the Great War. They were living in a new world and they had to tell their pupils how it came to be. Average pupils now attempting both Latin and French learned neither. He held that both in mathematics and science they had put the standards too high for the average pupils, to the detriment of other studies, which for them were more important, and that a course of arithmetic and simple geometry, combined with a course of general elementary science, was all that should be rightly demanded. “But,” he concluded, “I want to see an end of the mishandling of Tom, Dick and Harry because Gerald is a bright boy. That end I shall never see as long as the school certificate is tied up with the matriculation of the universities.”

Minority Treaties. After Sir John Simon’s masterly speech on the threatened rebellion of Poland against her treaties, one hesitates to add a word, says Professor Gilbert Murray in a letter to The Times. But, sooner or later, there will have to be some consideration of the demand, so long and earnestly pressed by many nations, for the generalization or equalization of the obligations of the Minority Treaties. I venture to think that such generalization, though difficult, is. not so impracticable as generally supposed. When I had the honour of proposing in the Assembly of 1922 the compromise rules now in force the great Powers consented to the expression of a unanimous “hope” by the Assembly that the nations not bound by the treaties “would nevertheless observe in the treatment of their own minorities a standard at least as high” as the treaties required. The intention of this clause was to give to any delegate the right, if cases of oppression arose, to rise in the Assembly and ask the Government responsible why it was not fulfilling the “hope" expressed by all members of the League, including itself. This right would be, I think, a fairly formidable weapon, but it has never been used. There was, however, another line of approach to the generalization of the treaties which was then in our minds and which still remains open. The object of the treaties, it must be remembered, was not primarily humanitarian; it was pacific. They were intended to obviate a particular danger to

the peace of the world arising from the transfers of territory, affecting fully 30,000,000 people, which took place in Europe at the end of the Great War. The Allied and Associated Powers, when making these transfers and putting these millions to a great extent in the power of their old enemies, took precautions against the occurrence of such wide and deep exasperation as might lead to another war. Thus a generalization of the treaties would by rights onb imply an acceptance of minority obligations by all Governments in respect of any territories which they have acquired in consequence of the war. This would be a comparatively small matter.