ART UGLY

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume 83, Issue 256, 30 October 1939, Page 9

ART UGLY

, IRITUAL VOID ENTER IAINMEN f INANE HEADMISTRESS OUTSPOKEN. (By Air Mail.) LONDON, Aug. 20. I | Miss M. E. Hudson, principal of St. I Elphin’s School, Darley Dale, Derbyshire, docs not think much of modern culture, art, entertainments, fiction, education. She thinks even less of the State. She has just sent a report to her pupils’ parents. And here are some of the things she has to say in it:— “We are less cultured now than the ancient Greeks, and a period of barbarism is ahead of us. “The ancients could not drive a car lat 350 miles an hour, nor fly from ’ Athens to London in a few hours, but they had higher standards of culture than ours. “Much of our modern art is ugly, our mass entertainments are inane and most of our modern fiction depicts people drifting from one love ; affair to another like monkeys in a I zoo.” I The old “educational trinity” in this i country, she says, was the Home, the i Church and the School. “Both home and church have abdicated their rights very largely, and the State is becoming parent, schoolmaster and priest. “We are spending thousands of pounds every year on education, yet nobody seems to know exactly why we are educating or what goal we are hoping to reach. “This is in harmony with our genius for muddling through. “Spiritual insecurity is more dangerous than military and economic insecurity. We have been living in a spiritual void, and we don’t know what we want in education because we don’t know what we believe.” “A defence policy” of passivity was not enough, she suggested, to preserve the ideals for which democracy stood. Mass opinion and mass emotion were dangers to be actively withstood.