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Salient. An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 19, No. 2. March 10, 1955

Too Political?

Too Political?

When some New Zealand student leaders are complaining about the "too political" stand of IUS, it is interesting to read the list of aims written into the IUS constitution with New Zealand's approval. Supporting youth and students of "colonial and "dependent countries, fighting, for their national Independence," struggling for "the democratisation of education." resisting "Fascism." and "defending peace"—they are all in the constitution as integral alms of the IUS.

Up to a point IUS is political, and it Must be so. Its politics are limited to the interests and needs and aspirations of students; they go as far as those things dictate—no farther, and certainly they do not stop short. But remember that the conception of education As A Right for all human beings, (a conception commonly accepted in New Zealand), involves highly radical political attitudes in parts like South Africa, South East Asia, and too Middle East. And remember, too, that National Independence in essentially tied up with cultural independence (as the East Bengali students have been discovering in their campaign of resistance against the imposition on them of a foreign language by the Karachi Government), quite apart from its being just. Britain achieved and maintained her Independence at the cost of much bloodshed from the days of Philip's armada to those of Hitler's blitzkrieg, and it ill behaves British students to condemn others who do the same.

There is some evidence, indeed, that many opponents of IUS disapprove of political action in itself less than they disapprove of the particular kind of political action into which the aims of IUS inevitably lead it. In Britain, whore the education system is less democratic than here, there is a larger proportion of university students who would be injured or affronted by such things as the extension of education facilities, granting of self-government to colonies, and other IUS aims. And these have Jed the split away from IUS.