FREEDOM IN EDUCATION

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Issue 156, 20 July 1937, Page 4

FREEDOM IN EDUCATION

-Press Association.)

"Most Prized Privilege of the European Student" FASCIST WAVE DEPLORED

(By Telegraph—

WELLINGTON, Last Night. Freedom, above all things, was the most prized privilege of the European university student, safd Dr Paul L. Dengler, director of the Austrio-Ameri-can Institute of Education at Vienna, in a New Education Fellowship semjnar address at Victoria University College, Welington, to-day. At Vienna University there was freedom from State interference, freedom of learning and freedom of teaching, the speaker "said. Dr Dengler stressed the fact that autonomy was an essential feature of good university life, and he deplored the wave o"f Fascism which was destroying the traditional freedom of his country 's universities. There must be freedom from State fnterxerenee, complete freedom for the university professor to choose "the method. of teaching the matter he* taught and his way of presenting it, and there must he freedom for the student to choose his course, to attend lectures as he wished, to select his teachers and to travel from university to university as his search for knowledge dictated. This outstanding characteristic of the Austrxan University represented complete freedom of speech for all. Dr Dengler thought that universities must arrive g,t a balance between the individual -and the community as the warring trends in society and guarantee complete freedom of th© universities to assist in taking the world out of its present impasse. Internationalism could only be a valuable feature of education if grounded upon a true understanding of one's own national li|p.