THE TOP OF THE LADDER.

Hokitika Guardian, 6 February 1929, Page 8

THE TOP OF THE LADDER.

“As education becomes more scientific and teachers more competent, a steadily increasing number of people will be trained up to the limit of their native capacities. They will be able to perform mental tasks which now, under an imperfect educational technique. have to be handled by people of much higher native intelligence, who rely on their own wits rather than on special training. In the long run, then, tlie range of opportunities for the Best Minds will be narrowed still further by the upward training of the Second, Third, Fourth and Fifth Best Minds. In the era of the New Leisure, how will the intellectually unemployed manage to deal with the real world? How can they escape the sterile years of metaphysicians and logic choppers ? With office doors closed in their face's, and with no funds for private laboratories, will they endure being invited to sit around and thinK, twiddling their thumbs in the quiet of a Utopia? They must scan and plan and do, never content with ‘tales of little • meaning, though the words are strong.’ Better a world less good and busier! Better a sea of troubles than a desert of ease! But who shall deliver them? And how?’’—Professor Waler B. Pitkin, of the department of journalism in Columbia University, New York. In his non I boo l a, “The Twilight of the American I Mind.”