SATURDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1920. EDUCATION AND LIFE.

Auckland Star, Volume LI, Issue 290, 4 December 1920, Page 6

SATURDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1920. EDUCATION AND LIFE.

It should interest people in general here to know that there is in progress at Home a vigorous controversy over the working of the new Education Act. Before 1918 in Great Britain attendance at some kind of school was compulsory up to twelve years, and there was further compulsion of a limited kind up to fourteen years. But the 1918 Act raised the lower limit of compulsion to fourteen years, and the higher limit to eighteen years; the period between fourteen and eighteen years being filled in by compulsory attendance at some sort of continuation school involving work above the primary school standard. Serious difficulties have already arisen in regard to the working of tho Act. Tlie cost of education to the State has gone up from less than £20,000,000 to nearly £00,000,000 a year, and it may easily rise to £100,000,000 along the same lines. Many parents are resisting as well as they can the well-mennt efforts of the authorities to compel them to keep their children at school up to eighteen years; and in many ways the Act seems to be working badly with the maximum of friction rund the minimum of benefit

But the arguments over practical details have naturally led back to first principles, and the case against the new Education Act has been admirably stated by Mr. Henry Arthur Jones in an open letter to Dr. Fisher, who is chiefly responsible for the system, and also in his "Patriotism and Popular Education,"' in which he boldly challenges the fundamental princple underlying this great experiment.

"The new Act," says Mr. Jones, "affirms as a leading principle of national education that all the children of our work'ng classes shall be forcibly instructed till the age of IS in certain matters vrh'ch

they are only Temotely concerned to know, to the comparative or total neglect of those things which for the stability of the State and for the necessities of their own livelihood, they aro imperatively concerned to make and to do." Would it not be much better, he asks, if boys and girls, having reached a certain level of mental growth and development, and attained a certain reasona.blc standard of educational efficiency, were to spend the next few years in preprfring themselves directly for the duties and occupations that they mean to take up rather than in purely theoretical studies wiVeh have no direct bearing on the chosen practical work of their lives. Is it not advisable, as Mr. Jones puts it elsewhere, "to educate them a» far as possible, and having due regard to their 'health, as early as possible, .to do and to make those things which are necessary for their own requirements and the requirements of the State, taking care to avoid educating the majority of them in su_ a manner that they will be unable or unwilling to perform those kinds and those amounts of manual labour which the necessity and -welfare of the State demands''? Before we go further we must, in justice to Mr. H. A. Jones and the point of view that he represents, remember that he insists on ample and adequate opportunity for the intellectual advancement and training of all exceptionally qualified children. Care must be taken, he holds, that "every child of unusual ability or mental capacity Bhall be assured a full opportunity to develop his gifts for his own advancement and the good of the State." Such a provision is recognised as equitable and necessary at least as fully in New Zealand as in England; but granting this, the question still remains for the educational authorities in both countries to answer, whether compulsory training should maintain itself permanently on the traditional lines that so-called "higher education" has bo long followed. Mr. Jones, in the book from which wo have already quoted, maintains that "as some 85 per cent of our population belong to the class who have to earn their living by manual labour in order to maintain the economic security of the State, it is advisable to educate some 85 per cent of our boys and. girls towards and not away from the performance of this necessary amount of manual labour." The effect of compelling boys and girls to attend secondary schools between 14 and 18 years is to train them for the most part on lines which will enable the great majority of them to crowd still further the already overcrowded professions, whether they have natural aptitude for such occupations or not, and will at the same time discourage them from taking up or training themselves to efficiency in the manual occupations in which they might have found success and happiness for themselves and prosperity for the whole community around them. The idea that every boy or girl is equally fitted for advanced intellectual work and equally benefited by it is a hopeless and pernicious fallacy. As the " Evening Standard" well puts it, any kind of education is bad which "prevents a lad who should be a bricklayer from becoming a bricklayer as soon as he lias a reasonable grip of things every civilised person should know," and a system which does not intelligently face the important truth that "efficient manual work is much more dignified, useful, and in every way profitable than inferior mental work," will certainly do as much harm in New Zealand in the future aa it is apparently t doing in England today.