"Without Vision, This People Will Perish"

New Zealand Listener, Volume 9, Issue 234, 17 December 1943, Page 10

"Without Vision, This People Will Perish"

(The final talk in a recent series from Station 3AR by

J. D. G.

MEDLEY

M.A., Vice-Chancellor of Melbourne University)

N my second talk I said that there are four general prerequisites for the continued existence of any kind of democracy in the world of to-morrow, and that our systems of education must be remodelled to the extent that these prerequisites necessitate. Ihe first is an efficient technique of quality control, and I concluded with some remarks on of the factors necessary to secure itextended educational subsidy to individuals and the disappearance of the idea that education is something to be over and done with at the first possible opportunity. There is a third which is equally important-a really efficient system of Adult Education. We have so far merely played with this all-important question. As a result once again of our economic absorptions, the average product of our educational systems has a narrow and incurious mind, It should hot be the business of an Adult Educator to have to create the appetite for knowledge ab initio. That should accompany a child into life as the principal result of his education. During the war, the Army Education Service has conducted an Adult Education experiment on a very wide scale, which has to my mind conclusively proved two thingsfirst, that there is in the ordinary Australian an appetite for enlightenment not oniy upon the current issues of the day, but upon the cultural side of life towards which his education neglected to direct him: and second, that the satisfaction of this appetite is an undertaking so much worth while that we cannot afford to relegate it to the comparatively minor position which it occupies to-day. I believe that the business of Adult Education should in the future be largely a Federal matter in Australia, and that in close conjunction with the States an organisation should be developed on a permanent basis out of the Army Education system. Service for the Community I come now to the second of my prerequisites for the continued existence of democracy-the creation for the ordinary person of the possibility of communal and disinterested effort. I have by the exercise of stern self-con-trol made no effort to offer you any definition of demotracy. It is, however, safe to say that its existence depends upon a certain minimum contribution of disinterested effort on the part of its ciizens. To what extent this has been a feature of our social life, you can judge as well as I. You will agree that it is not a prominent feature. But we need not despair, provided we are prepared to erect some kind of machinery which will enable ordinaty citizens to have, as citizens, greater administrative opporttnities in the course of their ordinary lives, The first essential is to ‘accustomn. thetti to community effort as

an essential part of their education: schools should be-and I am glad to say to an increasing extent are-run as communities and not as collections of isolated classrooms. Excellent work has been done along these lines of late in both State and Private schools. The second essential is to encourage by every imaginable means the erection of Community Centres in both urban and rural localities-centres in which the local social services are centralised and run to such extent as is practicable by the voluntary efforts of residents in ‘the neighbourhood. Such centres, are, in my view, the necessary hub of any living democracy under modern conditions, They are an essential adjunct to an Adult Education system, and their core should be a good library. Libraries are vehicles for a revival of the local loyalties which could and should mean so much to the ordinary man. The setting up of community centres on a large scale would do much to counteract the spirit that casts its burden upon the Government and waits about with its mouth open-a menace to itself and a standing invitation for the provision of the bread and circuses that are the prelude to revolution. No one can blame the ordinary citizen for adopting a selfish attitude if no opportunity is given to him to be otherwise. It is the business of any Reconstruction that means business to provide those opportunities, and in so doing to preserve practical democracy as a living possibility. There is no other way, as far as I can see, but the provision of something besides a general election that can act as a focus of citizenship for large numbers of ordinary people. Culture Nonsense My third prerequisite is that a living and relevant culture should be actively fostered. There has been few greater educational disasters than the implicit theory that some subjects are cultural and others are not. English is commonly supposed to be cultural, but Mathematics not. Dead languages are cultural, but Science isn’t, What nonsense it all is! The theory is, to some extent, a reflection of the fact that teachers vary in capacity, but the truth lies deeper than that. What is culture? I do not mean by it the precious possession of a minority. I mean by it what happens when men and women spend their formative yeats in the study of a curriculum relevant to the world actually around them, and go out into it with some background for the appreciation of its problems in their proper perspective. Three Pictures Let me conjure up before you three pictures-a young Elizabethan, nurtured on tales of adventure in an expanding world-roaring at Falstaff among the groundlings; a young Whig aristocrat of the 18th century, nurtured on the classics and the authorised version of (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) the Bible, reading Terence in his noble library, and talking like a scholar even at the gaming-table; a young Australian of the year of our Lord 1943, nurtured on Hollywood, "Speed Gordon," and radio, struggling with his notes on Macbeth for the Intermediate, A culture, aggressive and alive; a culture, narrowed and static but still relevant to the spirit of the age; a culture, fighting a dispirited rearguard action against emotional bankruptcy. Thére are still people who will tell you that a study of Intermediate Latin is necessary to salvation. If you ask why, they reply that it provides an impalpable something that enables you to write English better-in which case it is curious that only a very small percentage of those who matriculate can, in fact, use their own language in a reasonably coherent and workmanlike way. I am tired of hearing about "impalpables" in education, A scientific world just because it is scientific is not thereby debarred from what are sometimes patronisingly called "higher things" by the intelligentsia, and it is not a betrayal of such things to its demands if we ask that the results of any educational process shall be measurable within a reasonable margin of error. To insist on impalpables is the hallmark of a culture on the defensive-which is exactly what our Reconstruction does not want. A Plea for Relevance The ideas we have to combat can only be defeated by intellectual aggression on every front. My plea, then, is for relevance, for a-curriculum which will face the fact that it is dominated by outmoded cultural values, and that there is an overwhelming cultural value in relevance to the times per se. Until this fact is faced and very real changes made as a result, we cannot expect to see flourishing the proper child of Rele- ' vance, which is ‘Tolerance-tolerance towards the cultural experiments which must precede the flowering of any new order fully worthy of the name. If you educate for the 18th century in the 20th, you are producing an unnatural combination which can have little chance of healthy survival and will, like the Chimaera, spend much of its time very uncomfortably with -its head looking at its tail in a spirit of incredulous and sometimes active disapproval. I ask for more relevance in our curriculum of Reconstruction. Without it, we are condemned to wallow in a morass that may well engulf us, and if our successors have any sense of the fitness of things, they will see to it that the inscription on our tombstones is nicely written in Intermediate Latin. New Ideals My last prerequisite for democracy I described as a scale of ethical values which is based upon firm foundations, and not only taught but practised. I have spoken of our enslavement to economic ideals. We want new ideals. Can Reconstruction give them to us? There is a welter of conflicting replies, and one cannot trespass on to their battlefield without danger. But amid it all there is, I believe, something quite simple that can be’ said. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." Hackneyed? Yes, I know it is hackneyed; you read it in every Saturday leading article and hear it from every Sunday pulpit. True? Yes, the truest thing I have said to-night, if we do not use vision as a mere excuse for vagueness. It is so easy to take refuge in pious’

platitudes about Truth and Beauty. But we must not be put off with mere words. The vision necessary for this people, if it is not to perish, is nothing more and nothing less than a knowledge of Good and Evil, of Right and Wrong, and a capacity to distinguish between them. That may sound like mere claptrap. It is actually a note of the harshest realism. Can you look round this community to-day; can you view its stand-atds-its evasions, its ccinplacency, its concentration on itself-and feel that any mere machinery can reconstruct it to a better pattern? I, for one, cannot, and I have’no easy prescription for the remedy. I do not propose to be so adventurous as to embark upon the difficult controversy as to whether it is possible to provide workable ideals on any but a religious basis. But I want to say this. Real religion-define it as you will-is a matter not mainly of learning, but of living, and I am myself content to rest en the plain statement that a proper provision of living religion for the young depends ultimately upon the existence in sufficient numbers of the right kind of teacher-meaning by the right kind, the man or woman whose daily living example is worth all the ethical and religious instruction that was ever given. I am not suggesting that formal religious instruction should not be given in schools as and when it is found to be fit and convenient. What I am saying is that without the daily example of the teacher himself or herself, it can be of little avail. My final, and in many ways my most important Reality of Reconstruction is that on a long view the creation of the spirit which alone can make possible any enduring edifice must involve a radical change in the attitude of the community to the teacher-a change so radical that the teaching profession will be recognised as one which must draw on available Quality as no other, and receive the economic rewards which it merits by its importance. We have, in spite of ourselves, beén fortunate in our teachers; for no other’ profession attracts to it so many of those whose ideals will permit them to abandon all hope of either cash or credit. But there is a relationship even in education between the amount which you pay and the quality of what you receive, and Reconstruction must recognise it. If it refuses to, this people will perish.