MASS MIND

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 December 1941, Page 6

MASS MIND

AND NEED OF PRESERVING i PERSONALITY. I . ■ DEVELOPMENT OF SECONDARY EMPLOYMENT. , “My view is that it is worth while to • save personality, though over large : parts of the world today that is not accepted. All the ‘unconscious drives’ of our modern society are toward the ■ mass mind, and to oppose them we have to set ourselves to check the un*foreseen results of our vast economic development,” said Sir Hector Hetherington, principal of Glasgow Univer-< sity, in a recent address. “I think there is something we can do within the economic sphere itself. We have to develop within the sphere the technique of the secondary employment. More and more people will spend their working lives in industry in jobs which are not themselves contributory in any way to the development of personality and are, indeed, hostile to it. The ordinary work of the world will be done in considerably fewer hours per day and week, and there will be much more leisure. It is important that a great deal of that leisure time should be devoted to secondary- * employment, primarily in food getting —horticulture—or in one or other Of the arts or crafts of primitive society. It is important economically because this industrial world in which we live is a very unstable world. There are strong moral and spiritual reasons as well. Our educational policy and system will have to be thought about from this new point of view. It is no good in a society like ours to. equip people only for a highly specialised job which may at any moment leave them. We have to teach them to live a life in which they can fend for themselves. It is absolutely vital that we should make room in our social organisation for the initiative of individ- v. uals and groups. Ido not look for- \ ward with any pleasure at all to a society m which the whole of industry is centrally managed. lam not anx- 1 ious, for the health of the community, . to see central control so extended that J it. would be difficult, even in the eco- J nomic sphere, for individual enterprise to make its way.” ■