When Two and Two Are Not Four

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 188, 29 January 1943, Page 3

When Two and Two Are Not Four

E print to-day an interview with a microbiologist: whose social conscience puts questions to the still small voice of science. It is an old problem in the history of science and likely to remain. Even Einstein has plunged once or twice into politics, international and domestic, to the bewilderment of his scientific worshippers. But Dr. Blair is ' a better politician than Dr. Einstéin has shown himself to be. He does not think that two and two invariably make four: for example, that two farmers who like their work and two who don’t make four happy men when the day’s work is over. He wants to remove the two unhappy ones or to remove the things that make them unhappy, and he suggests that it "will be a big step forward when our agricultural colleges establish departments of rural education." By rural education he means light on rural problems of all kinds, but especially on those that arise out of the fact that the farmer lives and works in cultural isolation. If we grew our potatoes and fattened our lambs on city roof tops there would be no rural problem; but we send men and women and especially children into the wilderness to produce the things that the city consumes, and what worries Dr. Blair is how to make the life of those producers as full and as interesting as most people find the life of the city. It is a fact, confusing and very depressing; that most of the attempts made to improve the educational facilities of the country have had results exactly the opposite of those aimed at. District High Schools, for example, which were established to enable country boys and girls to get a secondary education without going to the city for it, have in fact opened a door through which the brightest of those boys and girls walk out. What Dr, Blair wants to do is to remove the desire to walk out, and it is to be hoped that his conscience is not pricking him uselessly.