“STAGGERING IGNORANCE”

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXXX, Issue 20165, 20 July 1935, Page 11

“STAGGERING IGNORANCE”

ABUSE OF MODERN GIRL At a recent conference of the Parents’ National Education Union .in England, Miss Marguerite Steen, wellknown author and educationist, severely attacked the “staggering ignorance” of the modern girl. Especially biting was her criticism that “many girls leave school with the outlook of an under-housemaid, but they have not the under-housemaid’s efficiency to excuse it.” Miss Steen hurls her epithets at British girlhood in general, and English girls in particular. “England,” she says, “is the most educated and, with the possible exception of Soviet Russia, the least-cultured country In Europe, thanks to the mass production, ten-cent store type of education, which reaches its scholastic climax in the matriculation. “I believe the two obstructions we are facing in dealing with the young are lack of interest and lack of initiative. Instead of ambition we encounter, too often, a petrifying apathy. I must confess I am getting very tired of the criticisms levelled at young people of to-day, although I admit their justice. “I admit to finding the young girl who has just left school wholly maddening with her lack of concentration, her indistinct intellectual values, her bad taste not only in actions and manners, but in all matters bearing upon art, literature, or music, and her quite staggering ignorance of everything that is not connected with herself personally, her school, or the home-life or movie stars.”