A PROBLEM-AND A WARNING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 232, 3 December 1943, Page 8

A PROBLEM-AND A WARNING

This is the first of a series of three talks given recently from Station 3AR by

J. D.

G.

MEDLEY

_M.A., Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University. Although he was

addressing himself to Australian listeners, what Mr. Medley has to say applies also to this country, where there are substantially the same problems. We shall publish the other two talks in the series later

some kind of a new world after the war, whether we like it or not-and only the wilfully blind can doubt it-it seems reasonably certain that we ought to be in for some kind of new education as well. Education has always lagged behind real life, and in periods of slowly changing conditions that hasn’t mattered so very much: the gap was never dangerously wide. But our lot has been cast at a time when conditions are changing, and are going on changing with quite unprecedented rapidity, and there is a very definite limit to the width of the gap that can safely exist between education and the contemporary scene. The public is gradually, but only gradually, awakening to the fact that our education is, in the literal sense of the phrase, behind the times, and that we cannot any longer afford to run the grave risks that this state of thing entails. The object of these talks is to arouse your active interest in a problem that concerns us in the acutest possible manner. x ie it is true that we are in for Don’t Expect Miracles One word of preliminary warning. — Education has a great-probably the greatest-contribution to thake to any plan of long-term reconstruction. The better future to which we are all turning hopeful, if apprehensive, eyes cannot be brought about solely by the formulae of economists, as some people (not, to do them. justice, economists), are apt to think. There has got to be reconstruction of persons as well as of social machinery. On the other hand, it is no good expecting miracles from education. In a world that knew exactly what it wanted or that lay at the feet of a dictator, whether benevolent or otherwise, a very few years of intensive education for all, in accordance with their capacities, could bring about a transformation in any desired direction, as Hitler's Germany bears witness, But in the immediate future, it will be the fate of the educator to continue to struggle against short-sighted views and interests, and there is no probability whatsoever that he will be given a blank cheque to remould the scene to his heart’s desire. And in many ways this is probably just as well. Much as I would like to feel able to do so, I cannot confidently predict either that reconstruction will be in the main the work of educators or assert that it would be likely to be very satisfactory if it was. We may hope gradually to acquire a somewhat more authoritative voice in affairs than we have been able to muster in the past, but we will continue to toil panting after the status quo, though the interval ‘between pursuer and pursued will, I believe, grow less as time goes on. The attitude of the public towards education is lukewarm, to put it mildly. There are only the rudiments of a common front among _ educators themselves, In England there has just

been produced the detail of a longterm plan covering the whole of the educational facilities of the country, and designed to provide for everybody the necessary equipment to enable them to function as citizens in the post-war world, In Australia we are not yet ready to lift the making of such a plan above the tumult and shouting of short-term political discussion, which means in effect that no such plan is possible. Until it becomes possible, we shall go on educating from hand to mouth, and continue to lose our way between them in a welter of largely unprofitable discussion, Contempt for Learning Archibald MacLeish, the well-known writer and librarian of Congress, recently delivered an address in Milwaukee from which I quote the following passage:There was never a time, I think, in the history of this country when learning was held cheaper than it is to-day-or when the men of learning and of letters had less honour. A hundred and fifty years ago in America, or 100 years ago, or 50, a man of learning was honoured for his learning. Today, to be an intellectual is to be an object of suspicion in the public mind. To be a professor is to invite attack in a public service, any public undertaking. To be an artist is to live beyond the reach of serious consideration. That is a strong statement, but its strength is deliberate, and designed to throw into strong relief the main thesis of the speech, which is that our enemies may well lose the war on the battlefield and yet win it eventually in the domain of the human spirit against which they have waged and are waging a campaign just as ferocious and even more insidious than that which they are carrying on against the armies of the United Nations. On May 10, 1932, there was staged in all the great cities of Germany the celebrated holocaust of books banned by the Nazi regime, when tens of thousands of volumes containing the accumulated wisdom of the finest spirits of mankind were burnt by shouting crowds, and proscribed for all Germans as containing matter dangerous to the development of the new German outlook on the future. It was on that day that their intellectual war against mankind was first openly declared, and ever since that day they have waged it by every conceivable means. That it had some success nobody can denyindeed the passage that I have just read to you proves that very clearly: that it may have more success in the difficult times that must come upon: us unless we are prepared to meet the danger boldly cannot be doubted except by those who refuse to face realities. Let us consider for a moment how we in Australia stand in this regard. Could It Happen Here? We tend to complacency about ourselves, and there are many among us who would dismiss with contempt all possibility of any extinction of the lights of our democracy. They would be unwise to do so. Compare our position (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) with that of the United States of America. That country has a tradition of respect for learning, which may at the moment be somewhat in eclipse, but which has its roots deep down in many places in the community. They will not lightly or easily wither away. Since the end of the last war, the problem of education in a democracy has been squarely tackled in America on a vast scale, and with some real success, Immense sums | of money have been spent on it andfar more important-the thought of many of the best minds in the country has been devoted to it. Coincident with this development-and it must, in fact, be more than a coincidence-there have been flourishing the beginnings of a real renaissance in American culturein literature, in architecture, in painting and in music-based, as all real culture must be, on a living relationship between man and his environment, and materialising, as all real culture does, the essential quality of the people which creates it. War, it may be, is slowing down and spoiling much of what promised so well, but a nation which has had a respect for learning and the beginnings of a culture of its own is in better case to withstand an attack on its spirit than one which has none of these things, And we have not. Our respect for learning is and always has been precarious and bounded by economic considerations. Our culture

-such as it is-is mainly derivative and shallow-rooted, though here and there may occasionally be discerned some beginnings of a real Australian outlook that is not merely parochial, but speaks with the accents of mankind. But in fact, we have little or no defence against a determined attack upon our adherence to the essential values for which we are at war, and he would be a very rash man who asserted that in the hurly-burly of reconstruction there was no possible danger to our casuallyassumed liberties, Comparison With England , Again, compare our position with that of England. Here, too, we find a traditional respect for and belief in the practical use of learning very different both in extent and quality from anything that we can muster — a respect that exhibits itself in the extensive recruitment of the Public Service from university graduates of the highest calibre and an increasing belief that the old slogan "If all else fails, try teaching,’ is not only out of date, but a danger to the community that echoes it. And to England war has brought one great good fortune which in the long run may well outweigh the many material tribultations which have befallen her. Her people have been welded into one by the dangers they have shared in common. The product of the blitz has been a real brotherhood

and a real tolerance and, whatever the cynics may say, I do not believe that any task of reconstruction is beyond a nation that has given so excellent an example to the world, or that any campaign, however subtle, can shake the permanence of the principles which have been proved by adversity. That is not our case, Relative to others, we have suffered little. We can still find time to indulge in the carefree. practice of the art of politics-on the basis of art for art’s sake-and it does not now seem probable that we shall be forced by enemy action into the position of having to present a common front against imminent danger in spite of ourselves. We are indeed a fortunate people — or are we? The answer to that question depends very largely upon the part we allow education to play in reconstruction. We shall, in my view, be in far greater danger from ourselves in the post-war years than ever we were in from the Japanese in 1942, If we presume upon our good fortune, it may well turn out to have been nothing but a catastrophe in disguise. If we reflect upon it soberly, realising that it is we who have got to provide the basis stuff, the basic attitudes of which reconstruction must be made, inasmuch as events have not provided them for us, there is no need for inordinate alarm. But our real foundations are (continued on next page)

EDUCATION AND RECONSTRUCTION

(continued from previous page) insecure, and could well fail: to withstand the strain of orderly reconstruction if we concentrate solely upon the material and economic aspects of our problem. The Sense of Frustration It is a common saying among observers of such things that the youth of the post 1914-18 generations has

suffered from a sense of frustration. Youth, of course, if it thinks at all, has always dashed itself hopefully against the bars that stand between it and its aspirations. But never before, I think, at any rate in the democracies, have so many felt that there was not enough on the other side of the bars to make any effort worth while. In England, the note struck by T. S. Eliot in his great poem The Waste Land was predominant throughout that 20 years. In America, the confusion of the period produced a confusion of voices-though some of the voices, as I have said, gave hopes for better things. In Australia, the keynote was an indifference to any but economic motives-an indifference fostered by our systems of education which despite some lip. service to other ideals have in fact been dominated by a vocational outlook which has infected all our thinking and all our doing. In all these three countries, which for want for a better name we must continue to call democracies, the first and toughest reality of reconstruction to be faced will be that its basic raw material, by which it must stand or fall, will consist of young and middle-aged people who spring from that background of puzzlement, of frustration, of passive indifference, or active discontent. That raw material will not be easily malleable. Some will come back from travels, fights, and adventures that would have turned Ulysses green with envy-and of these some will be ready to attack the future with regenerated ideals; othersand I think the majority-will view it with the suspicion that comes of complete disenchantment. Others again will have spent long months and years in comparative inactivity and have rusted into discontent. Others, who have played their part in industry, may well reach the peace with their old concentration on economic motives intensified by the spurious prosperity of war. There is no reason whatever to suppose that there will be a general and disinterested desire to tackle the difficulties of peace on the part of those who will be displaced by its coming; and no prints, however blue, of reconstruction will be worth the paper they are written on unless they represent something much more than a facade and take into account the psychological problem I have outlined. "| Am Frightened" It will be acute and dangerous in all three countries. There will be fertile ground for all manner of disorder, in fact for a state of things which may well bring essential victory to Hitler even after his armies have been dispersed to the four winds of heaven. It is easy to say-as many do in Australia-"Oh, things are different here. Democracy is rooted in the minds and hearts of. all of us. We are different from the old countries." I agree. We are different, different in that we have less efficient defences against the ultimate enemy than they. I have no fear for Great Britain. I believe that in the United States of America there is a sufficient spiritual toughness-though it is sometimes difficult to discern-to surmount the dangers of the next 20 years. But I am frightened about ourselves. We have been wandering between two worlds for so long, and we have so little in the way of counterweight to oppose to the forces _ that will confront us. That counterweight could have been supplied by education- _ and it can only add to the a hensions that much be in the minds of all thoughtful people that we are not at present prepared to do more than palter with its future, (To be continued)