TRIM OUR LAMPS.

White Ribbon, Volume 24, Issue 277, 18 July 1918, Page 10

TRIM OUR LAMPS.

Viscount Haldane, on education and democracy: “At the foundation of all reconstruction after the war lies tin* solution of this problem of education, and without that solution we shall not be pr* pared to face what is in front of us. An announcement which fills me with gladness is the determination of the* Labour party in their reconstructed programme to couple brain w ith hand. It means that up to now the* Labour party has confined Labour to manual labour, and has excluded brain power. The teaching profession is going to exercise great influence in the future, and then* is a close connection between the schools and democracy. There have been in days gone by, and there are still, some members of the Labour party who say they do not want this education until we have a social revolution, because, he said, if a new system of education were set up it would only be exploited by the capitalists. Those art* belated views. The workman wants to feel that he is doing something more than the work of a machine. He wants to be treated as a mind, and not as a machine. Industry depends to a large extent on knowledge, and there will be almost infinite grades among the workmen as individuals. We do rot know what we have done by starving our democracy in education. There may be genius in the brain of the boy or girl, children of the labourer, as in the brains of a child of a lord. If that talent never matures it will be a great loss to the which lies in the proclamation of the Labour party is taken seriously, they will have something which will not only go far toward solving tlv social questions of a subsidiary kind which arises out of this. The war has given us a chance to recover the ground we ought to have occupied before. The calamity of this war has its brighter side. W’e as a nation have been awakened from our slumbers. Let us see that our lamps are trimmed and ready.”