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Prime Minister’s Office stamp on front endpaper dated 9 October 1961 and written in pencil “ackn. 10.10.61”. Note Menzies lecture pp. 1-12. Book contains highlights in pencil of various passages throughout text, including: [p. 1] “It is calculated by the statisticians that in 1950 the population of the world was 2,500 million; than in 1975 it will be 3,800 million; and that in 2000 it will be over 6,000 million. These forecasts are, of course, based on present trends and the absence of massive catastrophe.”; [p. 2] “But in particular it is a challenge to us, as a nation, to play our part in increasing the world’s resources. And, in essence, that is a challenge to us to improve our education; for it is only by constantly improving education and skills that we can discharge our world duty [… Without increasingly educated people and political administrators, material potentialities may be either unrealised or partly frustrated by confusion or by lack of imagination.] These are obvious and elementary truths. It should be equally obvious that without growing numbers of trained and dedicated [p. 3] teachers, we cannot meet the demand in Australia and elsewhere, for the scientific, technological and administrative skills demanded by the task and the time”; [p. 3 – with respect to the need for a ‘liberal education’] “We know that there are difficulties, not all of them financial, in the way of achieving this ideal. One of those difficulties is the parent who says: “I want my son to earn his living in a specialised and highly-paid skill or craft. I want no time wasted on frill. What is not clearly and immediately relevant to the main end is unimportant, and a waste of time.””; [p. 4] “It not the business of today’s educators to turn out the 1961 model, with automatic mental transition gears. Once we get above the rudiments, education is the business, I repeat, of producing an educated personality. The work of organising a community educational service is therefore a complex one, requiring great skill, devotion, and understanding. What is aimed at is a general system. producing individuals of great variety.”; [p. 5] “I think that too much uniformity in education is bad, and philosophically considered, self-defeating, that I do not believe that the constitutional power over education should be transferred to the Commonwealth Parliament. In a continent like ours, with immense varieties of physical and human characteristics, variety should be developed. Men are different. It is just because they are different that our parliamentary democracy survives. For the greatest of all liberties is that which exists in a man’s own mind.”; [p. 5 – quoting Father J. P. Gleeson] “All knowledge is grist to the mill of the educator; but unless he concerns himself with his pupil’s character he remains an informer, a source of facts piled upon one another and imparted to a mind both immature and untrained in their proper use.”; [p. 6 – quoting Charles Morgan, Liberties of the Mind] “Immortality is not to be voted at a political meeting. Posterity will not stay in any man’s school. We are wilful and enchanted children, by the grace of God. . . . He whom we love and remember is not he who thrusts upon us his own dusty chart of the Supreme Reality, scored over with his arguments, prejudices, and opinions; nor he who will draw a map of heaven on the black-board and chastise use with scorpions if we will not fall down and worship it; but he who will pull the curtain away from the classroom window and let us see our own heaven with our own eyes.”; [p. 7] “It is perhaps unfortunate that a notion has obtained some currency, that there is an educational conflict between the study of science and the study of humanities; that students should be put to their choice of one or the other. This is quite wrong. We live in a material world, the forces in which it is the business of science to understand, and the business of technology to harness and direct. But this world, of matter and physical dynamism, is a world in which men live; in which the fate and welfare of men must be the prime consideration. It is in this sense that “the proper study of mankind is man.” I believe that the greatest scientists are well aware of this; are conscious of the duality of their task. We must not achieve a lop-sidedness in our education. A scientist who was unaware of literature and history or the principles of social responsibility would be dangerous. A humanist who turned his back upon the discoveries in natural science, who did not know something of their impact upon life and living would be condemning himself to a socially fruitless life in a non-radio-active ivory tower.”; [p. 8 – concerning the need for enthusiastic reading] “May I illustrate this by a reference to an art of which I must have no learned something; the art of politics. Nothing has so widespread a significance for the daily life of a nation as the decisions of governments. Small errors can do harm; great errors can inflict grievous injury. The statesmen therefore has the initial responsibility of close study and concentrated thought leading to a decision in his own mind.”; [p. 11] “But a sense of vocation has its own compulsions. And the greatest of these compulsions is to seek out and expound the truth. There can be no room for the slipshod or the tendentious. The old rules hold good that “references should be verified,” that facts should be ascertained with case, and presented with precision. An educated man is one who, in addition to a reasonable stock-in-trade of factual information, technical or otherwise, has learned to think for himself and to form objective judgments. “Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.” [quoting Francis Bacon]”; [p. 12] “It is a common, but attractive error, to think of modern advances in applied science, from the telephone to television, from the motor-car to aircraft to rockets and space vehicles, as in themselves as advancing civilisation. They may be wisely or wickedly used. Civilisation is in the hearts and minds of men. It will advance or fall back according to the use we make of knowledge and of skill. In spite of all we had had to our hands, the twentieth century has seen more of greed and humanity, more of war and barbarism, more of hatred and envy and malice, than any of us could have foreseen when we were young and hopeful.”; [p. 28 – W. H. Frederick] “If the function of a university is not only to add to knowledge but to communicate an attitude to it and to transmit it, teaching becomes important. The tendency for staff appointments to be made in tertiary fields on the basis of proved capacity to do research rather than proved capacity to teach reflects a widely held view that students, by the time they reach the university, do not need to be taught. Some professors and lecturers proclaim an interest online in their élite students and despise any art or artifice that would enable them to communicate more freely with second class and pass-type minds and to stimulate them to higher endeavour and greater understanding.”; [p. 52 – R. B. Madgwick] “In common, I think with many of my colleagues, I saw my job in the university as the perfectly simply one of questioning everything, and I felt little need to replace what I destroyed with any constructive creed or ideology.”; [p. 53 – R. B Madgwick on the family unit where the child ideally discovers] “tolerance and unselfishness are imperative in any group, and that self seeking and lack of consideration for other people are disruptive forces which lead to his own unhappiness and the unhappiness of every other member of the group. In short, it is in the family that the child should get his first introduction to the fundamental concept or prerequisite of democratic society, that freedom is not absence from regulations and controls, but an attitude of mind. Man becomes free, not when he rebels against society or social sanctions, not when he evades the law, not when he asserts his individualism against the interests of the group or groups of which he is a member – but when he becomes a tolerant and understanding social being, with his own standards of personal behaviour, with his own established views on things like religion and politics, and with a genuine appreciation of, and tolerance for, the society in which he lives and works.”; [p. 58 – R. B. Madgwick] “At their worst the mass media of communication can be, and often are, destructive of community standards. The growing tendency to regard as news only that which is sensational may well produce distorted views about important issues, and develop a wholly inaccurate sense of perspective in the reader or listener. The curious assumption that people are only interested in the abnormal, when this becomes the basis of news selection, has an unfortunate tendency to make the abnormal the accepted standard. The increasing accent on violence in the film or on television seems to produce a regrettable tendency, particularly in young people, to accept violence as a normal part of community life. The hand-out session with its enormous prizes may well develop a “get-rich-quick” attitude which is destructive of a proper attitude towards work and remuneration. The growing habit in the press of failing to distinguish between fact and comment moulds opinion in the mass of people who have no other means of distinguishing truth from falsehood.”; [p. 70 – W. J. Weeden] “Because, it seems, the biggest crisis in our Universities may have to face in the next few years could well be, on their own evidence, a crisis in manpower. So far, it seems, despite accelerated recruitment, staff of high quality are being appointed. This does not mean that all important Chairs can be filled quickly, or even filled. And the fact that more and more departments need more than one Chair does not make it easier. This is a serious problem which will undoubtedly affect other forms of tertiary education and must strain secondary education, too.”; [p. 70 – W. J. Weeden] “There is, however, one final suggestion to be made, and that is the needs of the nation are not limited to this country alone. Our institutions of tertiary education can be expected to train teachers, scientists and other professional workers, bother Australians and of other nationalities, who will serve outside this country, in our own dependencies and in developing territories and countries in Asia, in Africa and in Oceania. We must see that our development provides for this.”