Prohibition Propaganda in the Schools.

Press, Volume LVIII, Issue 17470, 2 June 1922, Page 6

Prohibition Propaganda in the Schools.

While the Education Department ia pondering its reply to our criticisms of the Prohibitionist pamphlet issued by the Department for the instruction of children in the public schools, various correspondents have written to us on

the subject. We print the letters of three of them to-dny—one from a country correspondent who quotes the oldtime teaching concerning the evils of excess as a precedent for the modem teaching that even the temperate usie of alcohol is wrong, one from the Rev. W. J. Williams, who addresses himself to Dean Harper's letters, and one from a third writer who challenges our statement that the pamphlet teaches that the use of alcohol even in moderate quantities is a sin. This statement, he says, is "a mere assertion," "merely an " inference drawn from statements con- " tained in the pamphlet,'' and, in his opinion, "an unwarranted one." Mr Williams contents himself with saying that there is little ground for our statement. Before justifying our inference, we may remind all our correspoudent.9 that when we repeatedly made our statement last September, Mr Williams, who repeatedlv wrote letters in reply, did not challenge our inference at all. His only reference to it was in the nature of a welcome to it. Of course our description of the pamphlet as one which would lead docile and sensitive and intelligent scholars to regard even the most moderate use of alcohol as a sin is quite warranted. The pamphlet consists of eight pages of strenuous polemic against alcohol, and no distinction is made between use and abuse. Alcohol is described as "a drug which "' is very poisonous to living tissues and "cell-life." The evil effects of excessive drinking are enlarged upon, hut tho teaching leads up to the statement that the effect even of "moderate and small "doses of alcohol has been conclusively "shown to impair the memory and the " functions of ideation and reasoning and "to diminish intellectual judgment and "mental activity generally." How would all this strike an intelligent child ? An adult who believed it all might regard a non-teetotal friend as unwise and mistaken, but would allow that his friend, believing the opposite, was not doing anything wicked. The child does not reason in that way. Habits and actions are not "indiscreet" or "harmful" to a child's eyes. The child mind is ' constantly taught that the line is between "right" and "wrong," and that what is "wrong," if it is deliberate and conscious, is simply a sin. In this ca:« tho intelligent child of non-teetotal but temperate parents cannot hut conclude that those parents are well aware of what he learns from the teacher, and that in spite of it they deliberately set about impairing their minds and hearts. The compiler of the pamphlet seemed to realise something of this, for he added a perfunctory and confused suggestion that the children need not apply the lesson of the pamphlet to parents who had had some different upbringing. This, as wo pointed out long ago, would only confuse the child, and at the best would make it suppose that the truth,-is not always the truth. The writer would have done better had he omitted this lame and half-hearted attempt to repair the danger of his teaching. He would have done better still had be confined himself to denouncing excess and preaching the virtue of temperance.