Pacific Educators

And Some Who Were Not So Pacific!

From Our Own Correspondent.

Honolulu, Dec. 16.

FOR five long weeks in the American summer of 1936, some 66 educators and social scientists gathered at the University of Hawaii, in Honolulu, and, excluding the press—because they declar ed the press does not “understand”— talked about social problems in countries bordering upon the Pacific.

Of course, there was plenty of back slapping and entertainment, and lots of epigrams and puns and familiar theories.

After all, what is an anthropologist?

There are some 1,400,000,000 peoples bordering upon the Pacific, so the educa ted gentlemen had plenty to talk about.

Most of what they talked about is sum marised in “Education in Pacific Coun tries”, which was written by Dr. Felix M.

Keesing of the University of Hawaii, who was one of the stage-managers of the conference. (Dr. Keesing is British-born, but for long knocked round in educa tional circles in Australia and New Zea land.) Dr. Keesing has done a good job of con densed reporting. He has reduced five weeks’ hodgepodge to 266 pages of read able material, a fine cross section of the 23 countries represented at the much quoted conference.

Strangely enough, the book was pub lished in war-torn Shanghai, by the firm of Kelly and Walsh, Ltd. It retails for six shillings.

The book does not tell the entire story: worthy of another book is the jealousies among the pet theorists, the politics, how there was much corn side-stepping. Why the book was -published in Shanghai would make a readable instance of how even 66 “educated” men cannot agree.

And they want to educate the natives of the great Pacific!