[falconer] conflict OF EDUCATIONAL IDEAS 239 



may be able to spend their free hours with greater enjoyment. They 

 must be given more leisure because they are men and not machines; 

 but inasmuch as leisure without pure interests breeds discontent and 

 evil, they must be educated so as to find interest for themselves in 

 new fields and to tap new sources of pleasure in reading, conversation, 

 art, music or travel. 



The present war has emphasised again the large part that the 

 press plays in the education of the people, and its baneful results in 

 Germany should set us thinking. A few years ago it would have been 

 incredible to those who knew anything about Germany that so many 

 of its leading men could have spoken as they have done, and that 

 such a stream of hatred, its surface fouled with lies and prejudices, 

 could have poured forth from press, pulpit and professors' chairs. It 

 is particularly distressing to hear teachers who were held in the highest 

 regard, justifying by tours de force the immoral practices of their 

 Fatherland and uttering claims that only a child would make. A 

 poison has for many years been infecting their life and has given even 

 good men a jaundiced eye for everything English. Never has a 

 subsidised and governmentally directed press produced such a moral 

 catastrophe. We may well take warning by this example lest we forget 

 the importance of a pure press for the education of all ranks of the people. 

 Not of the average alone; Germany has proved the truth of the maxim 

 corruptio optimi pessima. Free discussion in the press will be our 

 safety. Let us welcome criticism, remembering that tolerance and 

 liberty of thought are essentials for the education of a free people. 



The issue has been well stated by Lord Haldane, "Educational 

 reform confronts the nation to-day. What we want is a nation of 

 idealists as well as practical men and women, for it is perfectly recog- 

 nised that the best man of business is the one with the highest sense 

 of duty, the one who thinks of himself as a citizen of the State, touched 

 with that divine fire which brings order and proportion to his every 

 activity." 



Such idealism in education will be the greatest incentive to the 

 true scientific spirit, which is always intellectually eager, always 

 ready to scale the next mountain range over against the valley in 

 which this period of our life's broken history finds its transient abode. 

 The sphere in which the scientific inquiry is made is manifold — pure 

 science, philosophy, politics, economics, but the spirit of the truth- 

 seeker is one. Nor is it greatly dissimilar to that of the humanist. 

 To seek to comprehend man as he is in his present environment, 

 whence he came and what he hopes to become, is the object of scientist 

 and humanist, and it is to be fervently hoped that this temper of 



