FINE MEN AND WOMEN.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3229, 27 May 1911, Page 3

FINE MEN AND WOMEN.

WHAT ABOUT THE NEXT GENE i . ATI ON V

To make fine men and women is the single aim of all reform.. let as law ■ after law is passed regulating this, prohibiting that, organising something new, a dreary doubt infects the most hardened of legislators. What does it all amount to t Are the people any better for all the hurry of reform, do they live finer lives, have they wider interests, more noble ideals? The next generation will have healthier homes, better nourished bodies, ijreatei' (facilities sfor recreation; but will they be able to seize their chances or will they remain indifferent to ail beyond the little round of daily toil and trivial amusement? No one who is ,more than an automaton, repeating gramophone phrases about progress, can tail to face to is dispiriting possibility. If it is to be avoided something more than an improvement in material conditions must be postulated. An inward change must come to make men worthy of a changed environment. To education optimists look for tile power which will raise the coming generation to a higher plane of life but education, as interpreted in Codes and ladled out to children■ under fourteen, is no great, stimulus to a fuller ana ... wider life. It is not. at. fourteen nor even at sixteen that intellectual interet can take root in the mind. The love of books and all that they bring is strongest and best, in the after years when opoprtunitiee have passed and to the great mass of the workers the gates of knowledge are closed. If the efforts or social reformers are meant seriously, and a .real intention exists to heighten the value of life for all the citizens of this country, then a diffusion not of knowledge but of the spirit of learning is, above all tilings, necessary. To make fine men—intelligent responsive, alert—is the task to , which the Workers’ Educational As- ■ 6ociation has set its hand.

An appeal signed by the Head Master or Repton (Mr William Temple), by the Bishop of Birmingham, Professor Sadler, the Dean of Durham, and several Labour Leaders, sets out clearly the objects and the methods of the Association. In the busiest industrial centres that organisation of working men is gathering great classes of men and women students after the day’s work is done, not for an intellectual dissipa-tion-in the way’of popular lectures, but for steady, continued, systematic study. Over 2000 workers are engaged in a three years course, not in order that they may command a higher salary or seek to raise themselves out. of their own class, but simply in order that their minds may be trained to use and appreciate boons. This hunger for Knowledge is the best and purest of all human passions, its existence is the hope of the future. In its political aspect this craving for Knowledge is of supreme importance,, for the danger of an uneducated democracy which can read but not understand is appalling. The elementary schools are turning out a generation that can and docs road’ every sort of rash and foolish appeal, but has not the Power of distinguishing between sanity and folly, between appeals to eupiditv or passion and appeals to reason. I lie Workers’ Educational Association is leavening the mass of the untutored reading democracy with men and women who can understand economics and appreciate history, to whom the nature of the State, with its slow development and difficult achievement, is known. It is making men who can live fully and live well. That it should starve for lack of a little money would be deplorable, but we believe that the generosity of public-spirited men and women will j>revent so grave a reproach.