The Henson Journals

[164]

Tuesday, March 13th, 1928.

The snow, crisp with frost, lies over the landscape. Laws came to tell me that he had at last decided to sail for Australia on April 24th, leaving his wife and family to follow later. I told him that I should give him a month's notice on April 1st, pay him to the end of that month, and expect the house to be vacated by the same date at latest.

Lionel and I put on snow–boots, & walked in the Park for nearly an hour & a half.

We motored to Jarrow, where I confirmed about 60 persons in S. Peter's Church. The roads were still considerably encumbered with snow.

On my return to Auckland, I found a telegram from Downing in these terms:–

After your conference with estates Committee

They decided to make contribution of five thousand pounds.

This is a distressingly inadequate contribution. I asked for £25,000: I expected £10,000: I received £5000! Well, well: we shall hardly get the money we want unless Heaven sends us a benefactor. Lord Londonderry's contribution of £500 will have a paralyzing effect.

[165]

The greatest failure of the nineteenth century has been the failure of religious education. The eighteenth century closed with the belief in the efficiency of education, and the best minds of the day seemed to have dreams of universal education, & called it the universal panacea for all the social ills. We have already realized those dreams, & have discovered that the education of the head alone has not kept the promises which the philosophers of the eighteenth century believed it would keep. Education has not decreased the criminal classes, but has made them more dangerous. Our public schools give a child the power to do harm without the moral force & will to restrain him from using that power. In educating the head, and not the heart and soul, the public schools are failing at a crucial point.

Rabbi Hirsch quoted by Gore.

v. The Hale Memorial Sermon. 1927.

How far is the unquestionable decline in public morality attributable to the deterioration of racial quality through the increasing sterility of the best stocks? Is this, rather than faulty methods of education, the root of our waxing criminality?

[166]

Whatever may be the case elsewhere, in the United States, teachers themselves, save those exceptions which here as always prove the rule, whether in school, in college, or in university, are, and for some time past have been, in large part quite uneducated in any large and justifiable sense of that word. The elaborate training which they have so often received is a sorry substitute for education. They are highminded, eager & devoted specialists and illustrate to the full the definition, marked as much by truth as by wit, that the specialist is one who knows more and more about less and less. For whatever other purposes this trait may be useful, it is quite futile as an instrument of education.

v. President Murray Butler's Annual Report 1927

[167]

The estimated percentages as to the number of boys in high school who have probably had sex experience ranges from 30 to 90 per cent ….

My own opinion is that 50 per cent is a safe and conservative estimate for all classes of high–school boys averaged together ….

Inquiries among both girls & boys seem to show that in former years there was practically as much incontinence among boys as there is now, but that it was less apparent because then they sought prostitutes in the red–light districts. Also, that with the breaking up of those districts, they turned to girls of their own class, a thing they had seldom done in the past.

This tendency apparently gained a tremendous impetus when our young men returned from Europe after the war, inoculated with many Continental standards of conduct to which they had been formerly strangers. They urged those standards on their girl friends: it all fitted in with the hysteria for extremes which was a part of the rise of flapperism: & the result we now have on our hands, to make the best of!

The Revolt of Modern Youth p. 66

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