GIRL GUIDE NOTES

Evening Star, Issue 22143, 25 September 1935, Page 6

GIRL GUIDE NOTES

[By Guiusr.]

USE OF ROOMS. The Guide rooms are available to members every day until 6.30 and every Thursday evening. To avoid clashing of meetings, any person or group wishing to use the room at any time is asked to notify the secretary, who will then be able to give information as to whether the date is clear. _ Groups that meet regularly on a certain day of the month need give notice only at the beginning of the year, when the hall wifi be kept for them. INDIAN GUIDES. The Ist Otago Lones last Christmas sent a gift of a small World Flag to a company of Guides in a Presbyterian Mission school in Jagadhri, Punjab, India, and a recipe book to the _captain. A reply has now been received, the translation of which is as follows: “ Dear Sisters, —We Guides are all very grateful for your thought of us. When Miss Bardie told us you had sent us a flag and a cookery book, and actually gave these things to us, we were very happy indeed, and wo thank you very much. We have 13 Guides, and there are Bluebirds (Brownies) also. We have our class every Saturday. “ In the month of March we Guides and Bluebirds went to the canal. We had a good outing and lit fires and made tea. On the way we saw many different kinds of birds and trees. At that time the wheat was all ripe in the field?. It was a lovely time-, and we enjoyed the walk so much, but coming home we were tired. We hope to go out all together again some time. “I hope you will write and tell us about your Guide Bluebirds. With respect, _ your sister, Kamla.” Guiding is Guiding the whole world over. BADGE RESULTS. Book Lover.—llth Dunedin—H. M'Gregor, P. Stockdill, P. de Latour, K. de Latour : loth Dunedin—R. Mad- ■ ell,- M. Hay, Molly Hay, M. French, B. Brown; 17th Dunedin—J. Ainge, N. Sparrow (100 per cent). Whiter.—lst Dunedin—J. Williams, N, Guthrie.-D. Brown, M. West; 11th Dunedin—K. de Latour, P. Stockdill; 12th Dunedin—C. Knowles, J. MTnnes, A. Franklin, A. Tait. International Knowledge.—7th Dunedin, G. Wyatt; 9th Dunedin, G. Payne. Hiker.—7th Dunedin, E. M‘.Murray. BADGE TESTS. Ambulance and Sick Nurse.—7 p.m. on Thursday, October 3, in St. John Ambulance rooms. Needlework Embroidress.—All work must be in by 8 p.m, on Thursday, Octobers. LET US EDUCATE OUR HANDS. (By Paul Morand, in the ' Council Fire.’) Do you remember Barrie’s play, ‘ The Admirable Crichton,’ in which an earl's family, stranded on a desert island, becomes dependent for its subsistence, for its very existence, even, ou the butler, the only one of the party who knows how to use his, hands ? ■We are all a little like that aristocratic family. In this year of grace, 1935, how many of us would be capable of _ distinguishing edible plants from poisonous ones, of fashioning tools, of building a hut ? In this respect we are inferior to men of quality in the Old Regime, They had a closer acquaintance of Nature than we have—they had received a more comprehensive education. In olden days. children were cultivated, now they are forced, and the forcing process is concentrated on one organ only, the brain, and one faculty of that organ, the memory. Under the competitive system teachers cram their pupils’ memories till they burst. If many of them fall by the way, so much tho better, for this will reduce the lucky ones, who still believe that examination certificates will lead them to the heights, whereas it wcfuld bo closer to the truth to say that the absence of examination certificates will lead them nowhere. ■ Study courses have become alarming. There is a saying that, seeing how many virtues are expected of servants, very few masters would be qualified to be valets. Seeing what schools to-day expect of their pupils, we wonder bow many parents would be capable of being children! On. to these wretched children, insufficiently protected by Scouting, is directed from morning to night a stream of ideas, figures,_ diagrams, formulas, dates, behind which there is. no tangible fact, no concrete object which can be scrutinised, savoured, handled. , The child is submerged in a flood of abstractions. He studies botany, mechanics, electricity—but can be change a fuse, drive in a nail, plant a potato ? What is done to_ train his hands ? Pace, etymology, nothing is more remote from tho hands than a hand-book. And yet, as Helvetius said, if a man had had a hoof instead of a hand progress could never have existed. These scholastic excesses used to have a corrective —family life, which plunged the child back into reality. He saw his mother busy with household duties; lie saw his father working in the garden; he saw both of them making, mending, patching, and he used to help them. Now the maid-of-all-work does all the work, and the plumber is on the telephone. It is not so long since there was a conscious bond between man and his tools. Ho knew how they were made, how they were broken, how they were mended. ' To-day, like the farmers of America, we only know how to break them; wo depend on others to repair them. The abuses of tho machine age are such that'in England the women have deserted their saucepans, and even in tho depths of the country a tin of food is opened just before each meal. In France the young girls “ with fairy fingers ” are nothing but a memory, far off and faintly ridiculous. We bless the gramophone for having delivered ns from the five-finger exercises of young ladies who no longer play the piano. The .writer whose pen used to “ fly feverishly over the paper ” now dictates to a stenographer, and the material link which is used to connect thought with its material expression is broken. AA r c have given up the two great sports of our fathers, fencing and horsemanship, which depended on the suppleness, the quickness, tho lightness of hand, and wo have gone in for football, swimming, motoring, boxing. Instead of our hands we use our arms, our fists, our foot, and our eyes. Dazzled by cur mechanical conquests and their corollary, the over-develop-ment of muscle, and memory, we have not reacted against them, after the exampo of tho thinkers of 1848—Ruskin, Tolstoy, their fellows. They were (already) alive to the dangers of tho machine age and preached a return to manual labour as the salvation of tho soul, AVhat people is more apt for

this than the French ? It has been repeatedly said that he is tho best craftsman in the world; it is tho skill of his hands, lingering lovingly over detail, combined with tho aptitude of Iris brain for general ideas, which has hitherto saved him, on the one hand from sterile speculations, and on the other hand Irom soul-deadening labour. To-day wo have become “ stupid with our fingers,” and it is time to say, with Voltaire: “ AVe must educate our hands,”