WORLD PARLIAMENT

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

WORLD PARLIAMENT

University Chancellor’s Ideal. SWEEPING AWAY BARRIERS. (Special to the “ Star.”) WELLINGTON, January 17. 4 ‘ The parliaments we have as representing in often too futile a way the opinions of the unregulated, unscien-tifically-thinking masses lack not only foresight but practical wisdom. They keep passing laws that fail to get at the evil intended to be remedied, and have to be later on cancelled or left impotent,” said the Chancellor (Professor J. Macmillan Brown) at the annual meeting of the New Zealand University Senate this morning. 44 They can never lead to the rational .unification of mankind, such a unification as would sweep away and keep awav all barriers between the communities of the world and secure the peaceful intercourse of all nations and the rapid passage of the wisest and most practical ideas. With the universities and their graduates forming the constituencies in every nation and community mankind might make some approach to a world-parliament or at least to a conference fit to indicate sanely the conditions that should belong to a federation of the world. 44 But university education must be built on broader foundations than the narrow specialism that tends to prevail. It must be capable of selecting the wisest, most developed minds and characters that each community can produce,” he declared. 44 Every degree, however ultimately specialised, must have as its first the broadest culture that mankind has then attained; even a technician’s degree should be preceded by a training in and test of cultural study. It is only thus that a university and its graduates could be trusted to help in the election of a world-parliament. Then wireless communication may give a world audience to ‘ the parliament of man” and sweep away all tricks of demagogic oratory. The drama of the life of mankind we think we get from our journals will then be cleared of all its confusion and crosslights. The dream, is far from fulfilment, and will be farther if we prune the scholarship resources of our universities. The universal suffrage parliaments of to-day will have to be jettisoned if the world is to attain more than mere commonplace.”