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Hokitika Guardian, 10 July 1928, Page 2

PiiOFESsoit W. F. Ohbokne, of Manitoba University, who is visiting New Zealand, speaking at Wellington last week, took as his subject the now movement in Canada to organise, energise, and idealise a form of national education throughout the world that will help to bring about «. higher standard of moral and political national life. In outlining the new idea he said that it had sprung from the contemplation throughout history of the extent to which great calculating minds luul lieen able to’ play upon the regimented mentalities of nations to serve their own malign ends. He described how a weakly-controlled chaotic Franco at the end of the sixteenth century had been drilled into subjection to the wills of great men such as Richelieu, Mazarin, and even Louis XIV., until it was welded into a compact, contralised, efficient Government through the medium of education. Early in the seventeenth century it achieved the intellectual and artistic primacy of Europe. A later influence was that which had dominated Germany from 1878 up to the Great War-—a policy which had soaked the Teutonic mind with the dream of world dominance and government. The idea of taking up this method, said Professor Osborne, and using it for good, and not malign, purposes, had originated in Winnipeg in 1917, a’nd had at once caught the imagination of thinking men, who believed something might be done one day by educative methods in the schools to raise the standard of the nations, and create good citizens with the same ideals all over the Empire Conferences had already been held in Winnipeg, Toronto and Montreal, and it was now proposed to have a great one in Vancouver, at which he expected New Zealand to be represented by a delegation of at least fifteen representatives, of whom five should lie from Wellington. He did not think that all the delegates should bo educationalists; indeed, he made the point tfyat some of the delegates should be commercial men representing chambers of dommerce, farmers’ unions, Rotary clubs, etc., as Canada’s business men wished to meet and know them. Professor Osborne said that the Minister of Education had already promised that the Government would be represented at the Vancouver conference.