Education Burden
p. 48 · Read in the full issue
Carried By Missions
From Our N.Z, Correspondent
Auckland, Feb. 20.
/CRITICISM of the educational policy of the authorities in the Solomons, both _that part administered by the Colonial Office and that mandated to Aus tralia, was given by Rev. J. F. Goldie, pioneer Methodist missionary of the group, on his arrival here recently.
Practically all the education work was left to the missions, yet they did not receive co-operation and assistance. “A native wants more than mere protection,” he said. “Unless he is developed men tally and morally, a slave mentality is created, and the natives become an un natural, unbalanced type.”
Missionaries did not interfere with
native customs and tabus, and make natives wear European clothes and eat European foods. They sought rather to adapt old native customs and give them a new meaning. The missionary to-day was usually a keen anthropologist. It was time the old idea of him as a well intentioned, misguided fellow, forcing a religion on unwilling natives and des troying their culture, was dispelled.
Mrs. Lucy Grey, wife of Mr. Elijah Grey, died early in February at the War Memorial Hospital in Suva, Fiji, at the age of 33. She had been on a visit to Penang, Northern Viti Levu, when she became ill and was taken into Suva for treatment. Mrs. Grey, who had been married only two years, was a daughter of Mr. and Mrs. O. F. Nelson, of Western Samoa.