FASCIST EDUCATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1941, Page 6

FASCIST EDUCATION

AGREEMENT WITH GOVERNMENT ORDERS. “I suppose that most of us have realised by this time that in Europe of today there are two systems of education —two very different systems.” said Miss Cicely Hamilton in an address on the failure of Fascist education. “.If I were asked to define the difference I should say that one was education for the benefit of the person taught—the child or the student—while the other is education for the benefit of rulers and governments. The first system is designed not only to instruct, but to develop mind and character: to train up intelligent human beings, capable of thought and judgment. And that is the system of education that every free people must desire and see that it gets. If it does not get it, it will not very long remain free. The other system is that which is practised in all totalitarian States; which take advantage of compulsory education to train their young citizens not to think for themselves but to accept, without question, what their rulers wish them to think. In all dictatorship countries the aim of the school is the same; to bring up a race that never objects to the orders of its Government, that never disagrees with the opinions of its Government—a race of nice, obedient yes-men. It is a .lamentable fact that the school of today, over large parts of Europe, has ceased to be a school, in the right sense of the word, and has become a political institution that discourages thought and intelligence—a political factory for the mass-produc-tion of yes-men.”