The term "preservation" of Welsh culture has been used, and there is some danger that the word "preservation" when used in this connection may be misunderstood. It is possible that Welsh culture may come to be regarded as something static, to be looked at, talked about, and admired like some museum piece or as a strange anthropological survival on the western extremities of this land. There could be no greater error. A national culture is nothing if it is not alive. We inherit our traditions to add to them and to hand them over to our children. Our language, customs, habits, and usages, our way of life must change and adapt themselves to changing circumstances, and renew their strength through contact with the .world, if they are to live at all. A pupil well grounded in the culture and tradition of his own country will perceive this and know that the more they appear to change the more they remain themselves.
B. Culture and the Schools
There are many diverse elements in a national culture. The most important are its language and literature, its history and geography, its religion, its folk lore, its music, and those concrete manifestations which are grouped together under the term "material culture." While a classification of this kind is convenient for many purposes and, at the highest academic levels, implies separate groups of study, even at those levels there exist no sharp lines of demarcation. A culture is one organic unity and the elements noted are aspects of it; any complete view of it therefore must comprehend all these aspects, for to leave some out is always to distort the picture a little. It is this distorted view of Wales as the land of poetry and song that is often presented for the stranger's edification. It is this view which some recent novels, plays and films have represented; it is distorted because it is only part of the picture.
The curriculum of the school should be based on as many of these elements as is possible. In this sense they are of equal importance, but when a comparison is instituted between the culture of Wales and that of England or any of the great European nations, it will be seen that the Welsh language occupies a unique place in the culture of Wales by comparison with that of English or French or German in the cultures of their respective countries. The Welsh people have been an upland pastoral folk, poor in the things of this world, and have rarely attained a high standard in the arts of architecture, painting or instrumental music, because these arts require patrons wealthy enough to commission the artist or to buy his work. In Wales culture has found its chief expression in the practice of those arts that do not depend on material wealth—the arts of language, speech and song, and in the rural crafts. Hence the paramount importance of the language; it is the vehicle of all that was and is finest in Welsh culture. The flower of Welsh culture is revealed in the work of its poets and prose writers, its orators on platform and in pulpit, its dramatists,
