The Timaru Herald FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1932. ONE WAY TO END WAR.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXVII, Issue 19373, 23 December 1932, Page 8

The Timaru Herald FRIDAY, DECEMBER 23, 1932. ONE WAY TO END WAR.

More than fourteen years have passed since the bugles blew “cease fire” and the flames of national hatred flickered and burned low, while living men and women who had escaped the Grim Destroyer looked round with tired eyes at the ruin and death which littered the scarred earth. For more than fourteen years the representatives of nations have held high council, talked many platitudes, and the world has wrung its hands as it has watched conference succeeding conference while all the time the war clouds have darkened the horizon and steel has scraped the scabbard. It is therefore not surprising that the world is looking for leadership. Hence the attention paid the pronouncements of that leading social prophet, H. G. Wells. As historian, novelist, writer, and thinker too, lie is known to hold decided views on the great questions of the day. Mr Wells is quite emphatic that world peace stands or falls on education. “At the present moment,” he says, “we have no sort of educational philosophy. We make not the slightest attempt to teach children the truth about the general ideas they employ or to introduce them to the actual meaning of words. They come to think of countries as being of the same sort of order of things as human persons.” It is suggested that the rising generation see the whole of international affairs as dramas between personalities of that kind, a delustion very congenial to the human mind. In the Middle Ages they called such an attitude realism, the realistic philosophy. “We ought to insure,” Mr Wells insists, “and in the modern world we are supposed to, t,hat our teaching is based on the scientific treatment of things, and our children ought to be guarded against the delusion of this realism. They should be taught that history is , not a battle between personifications.” Obviously, Mr Wells has .in mind the conventional type of public schools in the Old Country, which bears little resemblance to the broadly based educational facilities provided in Yew Zealand. Nevertheless, the vital importance of education in moulding the views of the leaders of the nation can hardly be over emphasised. “In schools,” Mr Wells insists, “it is possible to teach history in such a manner that, instead of presenting life as a drama, a competitive drama in which nations as principals strut the stage, we can present it as the great adventure of the whole human species” : “Children are much more Interested,*' said Mr Wells, “in the story of human adventure and discovery and human achievement. They are much more interested in the way of life and the hunting, pastoral, and nomadic and agricultural stages of man’s history, than in the elaborate, bloodstained story of kings and queens and princes, campaigns, annexations and national prestige with which we try, despite their wholesome instinctive resistance, to fill their minds to-day.” But if Mr Wells delights in tearing aside the curtains of convention, he lias a wonderful capacity for putting into forthright language/the thoughts the average man struggles almost futilely to find expression. To Mr Wells two things are fundamental to world peace: the replacement of the narrow nationalism which passes in many schools as history teaching and the abolition of tariff barriers. The child should learn from its earliest days to look upon the world as a unit, economically, politically, and spiritually. Mr Wells insists that the child should be taught cosmopolitan universal history, beginning with early man, follow- ; ing the rise and fall of civilisations which had led to our own mechanical age. Says Mr Wells:

“I do not agree with the commonly accepted theory that the Romantic Age should be studied during the period of adolescence. I favour an alternative history syllabus, and I am convinced that in a very short time we could have the broad facts of human history taught to-day in practically the same terms throughout Europe and America. On minds prepared in this fashion, it\ would be possible to build the new conceptions of an organised world peace.

As a staunch and outspoken advocate of the school of thought which insists that education plays an important part as a means towards the attainment of world pdace, it is not surprising that Mr Wells draws pointed attention to the treating of history:

“Of course,” continued Mr Weils, “responsibility for the present state of affairs, does not lie primarily with the teachers. Parents must remember that they compose probably the larger part of the electorate. Members of Parliament and local education committees are answering to them finally, and not to the teaching profession, for the kind of education provided in our schools. What is required in every country is a great nation-wide campaign now, so that our children may be given a true picture of the world’s development and a right appreciation of their nation’s place in relation to every other people.

But by way of generous concession, Mr Wells hastens to confess that, of course, Great Britain is not the only culprit. The danger to world peace is that all over Europe and across the Atlantic,

too, children are being taught to regard Britain from the same jaundiced point of view as some of the more narrow-visioned children in Britain look at them. Once having put themselves in the right path, the next task for all broad-minded citizens, is to prove to others the worth of their cosmopolitanism. It should be shown that this must begin in the schools, but, of course, this cannot be done by any country until it has set its own house in order.