Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JUNE 5, 1911. TO MAKE FINE MEN.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10254, 5 June 1911, Page 4

Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, JUNE 5, 1911. TO MAKE FINE MEN.

To make fine ®?-©n. and-. women isthe single aim of all reform. Yet as law after 'law. is passed regulating this, prohibiting . 'thai;'/organi«-irig something new, a dreary doubt infects the; most- hardened of legislators. What does it all amount top Are the people any* better for ail the hurry of reform, do they live finer lives, have they wider interests, more noble ideals? The next generation will have healthier homes, better nourished bodies, greater facilities for recreation; but will they be able to seize their chances or will they remain indifferent to all yond the little round- of daily toil and trivial amusement? No one who is imore than an automatum, repeating gramophone phrases about progress, can fail to face this dispiriting possibility. If it is to be avoided sosmeifliing more than an improvement in material conditions must be postulated. An inward dhange must oocfne to make men worthy of a changed environment. To education optimists .look for the power which will- raise the coming generation .to a higher plane of life, but education, as interpreted in Codes and ladled out to children under fourteen, is no great stimulus to a fuller and wider life. It is not at fourteen nor even at sixteen that intellectual interests can -take root in the mind. The love of books and all that they hring is strongest and best in the after years when opportunities have passed and to the great mass of the workers the gates of knowledge are closed. If the efforts of social reformers are meant seriously, and: a real intent-ion exists to heighten the value of life for all the citizens of this country, then a diffusion not of knowledge but of the spirit of learning is, above all things, necessary. To snake fine men— intelligent, responsive, alert —an. association ha,s been formed in England, known as the Workers' Educational Association. In the busiest industrial centres this organisation of working men is gathering great classes of men and women students after the day's work is done, not for an intellectual dissipation in the way of popular lectures, but for steady, continued, systematic study. Over two thousand workers are engaged in a three years course, not in order that they may command a higher salary or seek to raise themselves out of their own class, but

simply in order that their minds may be trained to use and appreciate books. Tiiis hunger for knowledge is the best and purest of all human passions; its existence is the hope of the future. In the political aspect this craving for knowledge is of supreme importance, for the danger -of an uneducated democracy wiliidh can read but not understand is appalling. The elementary schools are turning out a generation that can and does read every sort of rash and foolish appeal, but has not the power of distinguishing between sanity and folly, between appeals. aO cupidity or passions and appeal® to reason. The Workers' Educational Association is leavening the mass of the untutored reading democracy with men and women who can understand economics and appreciate history, to whom the nature of the State,' with its ,slow development and difficult achievement, is known. It is making men wiho can live fully and live well.