EDUCATION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 64, Issue 4561, 17 April 1942, Page 3

EDUCATION

MOST IMPORTANT POLITICAL POST “The office of President of the Board of Education should be regarded as one of the most important of all British Ministerial posts. Some years ago, lecturing to an annual conference of teachers, I expressed this view and said that if teachers had any pride in their profession, and really regarded it, as they ought to do, as the most important profession in the world, they would refuse to vote for any political party which did not tell them in advance wjiqm it proposed to make Minister of Education and did not produce ample evidence that he was a person of capacity and sense. The teachers laughed politely, as at a not very good joke. I told them that I was acquainted with a great many ambitious politicians and that I knew several who had their eyes on the Prime Ministership, and many, slightly less ambitious, who hoped to become Chancellor of the Exchequer or Foreign Secretary or First Lord of the Admiralty, but that I had never come across one who considered that his political ambition would be satisfied if be became President of the Board of Education. They seemed to find nothing remarkable in this. They accepted the fact, as practically the whole of British public opinion accepts it.”—Mr Francis Williams, who for some years was editor of the “Daily Herald,” in his book .“Democracy’s Last Battle.”