HIGHER EDUCATION.

Star (Christchurch), Volume XLIV, Issue 663, 17 January 1933, Page 4

HIGHER EDUCATION.

Sphere of University Training. THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH. (Special to the "Star.") WELLINGTON, January 17. “ The university takes advantage of Nature’s differentiation of individuals, and, getting the best out of the best of them, hands it on from generation to generation,” said the Chancellor of the New Zealand University (Professor J. Macmillan Brown) at the annual meeting of Senate this morning. The Chancellor went on to say that competition was the method of . Nature to secure progress. For this no two individuals of the same species were born alike. Man had forged ahead of all other living beings on this planet because he had made this differentiation deliberate and intensive. If only acquired skill and abilities and virtues could be made hereditary and passed on from generation to generation progress would be lightning swift. The nearest approach that could be made to it was by means of higher education. Universities and institutions that prepared for such a course stored up and improved methods of one generation in order that those which followed might benefit by them. The exceptional individuals of one generation might improve methods and maps of research it had received from its predecessors and pass on the improvements to those that followed. 14 This is the nearest we come to that much-longed-for hereditary transmission of acquired learning, skill and talent to subsequent generation's,” continued Professor Macmillan Brown. 44 Isolation of any community destroys its progress by neutralising this power of transmission of the best, as we see in the United States and Soviet Russia.” The Chancellor remarked that history began by empire-making, which organised sections of mankind as armies that progressed by altruism. The farther one went back into prehistory the more isolation there was. Each family or tribe counted itself as mankind. The beginnings of history were to be seen in the efforts to break down the barriers that separated the tribes of a region and to form empires or federations -which allowed or encouraged mutual friendly intercourse guided and protected by law. To cross great oceans enabled man to advance more rapidly to his unification, and the British Commonwealth of Nations forecast the goal. Professor Macmillan Brown declared that the settlement of disagreements would be easier when the League of Nations included all the communities of mankind. The constituents were the universities, and the most highly educated and most scientifically minded men of each nation. 44 The universities are the national chromosomes that transmit the advances of one community and one generation to others,” he added. " And these new acquisitions in skill and talent from generation to generation become more and more practical and powerful. The universities must displace the universal suffrage Parliaments if the dream of a ‘-federation of Jhe world ’ is to be realised.”