FREE THINKING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 18, Issue 463, 7 May 1948, Page 5

FREE THINKING

Sir-Referring to your editorial of April 16 it is open to question whether the young person entering a university is, in the strictest sense, capable of free thinking, because the mind by that time has already been conditioned by preliminary primary and _ secohdary instruction. J. S. Mill said: "A general State education is a contrivance for moulding people to be exactly like one another ... it establishes a despotism over ‘the mind." In 1944, lags L. Becker, a distinguished American, said: "Most men have believed that the danger inherent in learning could best be’ met by schools under proper. control teaching the right things-the ideas and beliefs, whether true or not, that would tend to confirm rather than to undermine the established social system." Minds so dealt with are already somewhat shackled when adolescence is reached, and it seems as if the effort to secure real free thinking must begin before the university. What universities; and I hope the rest of us, want is to preserve freedom of expression of thought. We are all free to think what we like and no harm done so long as we do not utter it. But throughout the world to-day there seems to be a tendency to adopt the Japanese idea of persecution of "dangerous thoughts." Liberty, political liberty-what the experts call juridical defence-is summed up in the ‘right of expressing one’s thoughts freely in speech and print and organising to give effect to those thoughts. The United Nations, with its proposals for restricting the Press in regard to publication of war propaganda, seems to me to be lending itself to nibbling threateningly at this fundamental freedom. In the last analysis the current social and political ideas rest upon a basis of force capable of imposing them if need be. But in my judgment we shall get nearest to maximum freedom if we can hit upon a. system permitting the greatest freedom of expression of thought, checked by something to prevent the imposition of views by physical or economic force. History, I think, shows that hitherto the greatest freedom has come from the conflict of a number of religious, political and social ideas, for which pre-eminence has been sought. That struggle will continue to produce most freedom if it can be car. tied on under conditions whereby no one set of ideas can be imposed by force and the bloodstained record of the past will be supplanted by the bloodless conquest of the mind. It should not be beyond us to devise a system which provides a kind of balance between the contending fortes and ensures that no | one can overpower all the rest. +

J. MALTON

MURRAY

(Oamaru).