FAIR PLAY!

Dominion, Volume 10, Issue 3025, 12 March 1917, Page 6

FAIR PLAY!

BOYS NOT TAUGHT THE MEANING OF FAIR WORK Mr. W. L. Hichens, chairman of Messrs. Cammell, Laird, and Co. ) speaking-at the annual conference at the Incorporated Association of Headmasters at the Guildhall recently, said; that he often 'wondered why the number of public school hoys who chose engineering as a profession was so, small. We lived in a mechanical age., and our material progress was more closely bound up with engineering: than with any other profession, .yet boys preferred the counting-house or the Army or the Civil Service. The reason was partly because fow scholarships were offered to carrv boys through their apprenticeship; hut themain reason was that the engineering career did not offer the same certainty as the others. Tbe.se were miserably paid as a rule, but they offered a safo though modest ronroctence. and during recent years boys have been taught to go for the safe thing. Yet there was nothing that sapped the moral fibre of any boy—or indeed any nation—more effectually than that ho should embark on the journey of life with' the motto "safety first" hung: round his neck. How far did modern N odticatiori teach a bnv how to learn and how to live? He thought that the tendency of modern education was often in the wrongdirection—that too little attention was given to the foundations which lay huriod out of sW.it helow the ground: and ton much to ;\ showy superstructure. Nn one. could fail to notice the tendency to keep moral education apart from the rest'of +he curriculum._ The consequence was that a hoy's religions life and his ordinary evcry-day life were in two separate water-tirdit comruirtments, and this fatal doubleness of life—tip's dunlicitv—pursued -him to the end of his dnvs, producing that shanelessncss of life which Plato regarded with so much horror. The code of honour which regulated his everyday life wits derived, not from religious teaching, hut from the cricket field or the football ground. He grew to understand that he must "play the r;ame" in the affairs of every-day life, but he vrns not taught th.it there is a "fair work" corrosooiiding to a "fair play.'