EDUCATION AND COMMERCIALISM.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 1479, 30 November 1915, Page 4

EDUCATION AND COMMERCIALISM.

One of the things which New Zealand has missed during the war —as It did in the days before the war —is the University (according to some observers). It is said that the University Colleges are not yet figuring nearly as well as they should in the national life ; critics declare that the graduates, as a class, have done the part expected of them in the important work of the country. On this subject an editorial article in the Otago University Review has some remarks which should interest the general public. “The history of education,” the writer states, “is a history writ in tears. To think what it might have been and then what it is— of the high hopes shattered and the standards dabbled in mire. Forty centuries of rod and book, and we have come at length to —Utility ? Four thousand years to slough off our skins, and only our bauds yet tree. “Is not the history of education the history of civilisation ? Even on its formal conscious side, is it not hoary with untold years ? While Abraham dwelt in the land of Ur the Chinese opened their sacred books; and all befogged though their land is now, knowledge is sacred still. Knowledge, remember ! Not technical skill ; not degrees, not passes, nor permits to auction their wares. “Then Greece stepped in. With a passion for knowing the world has never surpassed, she standardised culture for two thousand years. Rome rose and fell, the Saracens raked at the blood-quenched fires of the East, the candles of Christ, though they flickered, smoked on and flashed up at last—and still, though they knew it not, Greece held captive men’s souls. She was not to be conquered except by gold. She had survived pestilence, she had survived famine and the sword. She fell, it would almost seem, for ever, before the new terror of trade. Men grew commercial ;in America, in Africa, in India, on the great high seas themselves, the race was to the swift and the battle to the strong. “To-day we cannot resist our fate. We go to school, we graduate from college, and the gleam of the dollar is the lamp that lights our path. Studies are priced like tradesmen’s wares, and, with exceptions so casual that they hardly count at all, the advantage of a university education is financial or social, or both. “All this the Workers’ Education Association would change. For education for the pocket it would substitute education for life; for social advancement it says social service ; it says growth instead of grab. Indeed, though it is an ancient story, it is not yet without its sting, that the very class to whom education is the only open sesame to pelf and power should have sounded this high note —and not only sounded it, but bravely and gladly marched to it.”