THE GIFT OF LEISURE.

Putaruru Press, Volume IV, Issue 121, 25 February 1926, Page 7

THE GIFT OF LEISURE.

REDUCING WORKING HOURS. It may be tliat tbc reduced working hours in some trades have for the time being put a financial strain upon those trades. But they can recover, and we should avoid anything tending to drive back the worker to long hours of labour, writes J. R. Clynes, 11. P., in the ‘ ‘ Yorkshire Evening News.’’ The worker, however, will lose the greater gifts of leisure if he spends the whole of his resting time merely in pleasure, recreations, sports, entertainments, or the social joys of life. These must have their place. But to sacrifice all study to these other attractions is to make a lamentable mistake and to forfeit the prospect of that degree of improvement in the mentality of the worker which reduced hours of labour should help to secure. Study may be followed upon many different lines, and in urging it I am ( not thinking of requiring everybody, J say, to study politics, economics, or the history of national development'. A score of other lines of study may serve in the making of a better man as well as these. The great thing is to awaken some definite interest, and after it is aroused energetically to strive to fill in some allotted time in a manner to enlarge the intellectual interests and create some quite definite object to be followed with the devotion of a cause. The branches of study which I have named have been pitifully neglected, and even now little is done on a general or extensive scale to lay the foundations of popular interest in the pursuit of the most helpful branches of knowledge. Our educational system slowly improves. What a wonderful system it -would be if its progress had been as marked as the sciences, arts, and mechanics. Deep as have been the discoveries of the past generation, they have left too many dull minds in every town and city where still we find thousands of people with scarcely any taste for reading. We ought not to wait for a perfect educational system, nor until each person can be taken in hand by the State, to continue through years of maturity train (id instruction at public expense. No system and no expense can produce individual improvement without individual interest and exertion. The community can be elevated only in the degree of personal elevation, and no matter how much the State may do in providing costly bacilitics for elementary and secondary school education, the personal interests of large masses of iieoplc are awakened and followed of manhood and womanhood, and unless the benefits of that education cannot be enjoyed in full unless they are carried forward to the more mature years upon student iines.