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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 1, No. 13 June 29, 1938

Social Services

Social Services

Great stress was laid on social service work, boys' and girls' clubs were to be visited and organised and particularly and above all else an effort was to be made to get among the unemployed and the working classes generally: the enthusiasm for what was to be learned from the working-classes was unbridled and listening to it I gathered that between the very rich and the very poor. If there is anything at all it is only an arid waste with the community is concerned—there was so much that the workers of anything that a middle-class (if such existed) could do for us: this is where I criticise the delegates. Where I part company with them, and where I feel that they give themselves away as mere idealists, immature and out of touch with essential conditions of which they have never had the need to become conscious. For the rest the results of the discussions could be regarded as nothing but praise worthy: the conclusion—seemed to be inevitable, that authoritarian rule will most probably lead to war that in any case it will destroy freedom of expression which is the life-blood of learning and of the University, that the one way to evade it is by a wider educational policy requiring a re-orlentation of the University syllabus, first in the direction of greater emphasis on public affairs, and secondly to allow of the student spending more time in contact with the world around him—this must be done quickly since, as H. G. Wells has put it, "Civilisation is a race between education and catastrophe." Would the New Zealand student concur in these conclusions? If not, why not?

A. T. S. McGhie.

And these your professed politicians, the only true practical philosophers of the world (as they think themselves). So full of affected gravity, or such professed lovers of virtue and honesty, what wretches they be in very deed.

—Mareus Aurellus.