UNIVERSITY TRAINING

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 513, 22 April 1949, Page 5

UNIVERSITY TRAINING

Sir-I have been studying your "Training at the University" and there is only one of the writers who seems to me to "hit the clout,’ Miss Nancy Northcroft,. who asks for "a study of the natural environment and man's relationship to it." If a university sends out its graduates convinced that the Universe shows neither Plan, Control nor Guidance the result will be disaster for them and for the community. The first thing to study then must be the Universe and Man’s place in it. A little astronomy and cosmogony will bring your student to geology which shows the gradually unfolding history of the earth and its inhabitants. Palaeontology would lead to history with its twenty great civilisations, which all seem to haye failed from the same cause-wealth above and poverty below-while the oppressed peasants flocked into the great cities, From that a study of Prince Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid and also of the art and beauty cultivated by paleolithic man would show how gladly we respond to co-operation and to the beauty which everyone can recognise in the home he grew up in. These studies led by men who themselves’ had faith in the infinite around them should be the beginning and the foundation of all education. Teach Latin and Greek if you can find time for them, but -you must have biology, geology, and the history of co-operation among the gregarious animals and among primitive men; for if "kill or be killed, eat or be eaten" is all that science can teach, our education will only vroduce atom bombs.

THOS

TODD

(Gisborne).