The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1926. AMERICAN FADS.

Auckland Star, Volume 246, Issue 246, 16 October 1926, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 16, 1926. AMERICAN FADS.

For the cause that lacks assistance. For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that toe can do

It is to be hoped, that our educationists will ponder needfully the opinions expressed by Dr. Cairney, of Otago University, regarding his recent experiences in the United States. Dr. Cairney has been engaged for the past twelve months in anatomical research- in America, and the strongest impression left upon his mind as the outcome of his contact with the medical profession and with universities on that side of the Pacific is that of "a tendency toward new and fancy schemes, rather IJian toward thorough teaching of oldfashioned things which have stood the test of time."

We are not so much surprised as Dr. Cairney appears to be by the spectacle of "a Department of Commerce full to the doors" while the benches in the Latin and Greek classrooms are empty. When once Universities established a "modern" side and proceeded to grant degrees in commercial subjects, the balance was certain to swing that way in all great centres of industrial and mercantile activity; and m that respect the Americans may fairly claim to lead the world. Whether the kind of intellectual training and development secured by a purely commercial University course can bear comparison with academic education of the older type is quite another question.

As to the undue prominence given to athletics in many of the leading universities in the United States, we are entirely in accord with the Otago professor. That a football coach should rank as a professor and should be paid at least as high a salary as any other teacher in his university, represents to us a grotesque perversion of the meaning and purpose of education of which our American friends ought to be heartily ashamed. But from Dr. Cairney's standpoint the worst thing about these extravagances and eccentricities is that other people are liable to imitate them; and this applies undoubtedly in the sphere of education everywhere. So far as New Zealand is concerned, there is no doubt that, as Dr. Cairney has said, there has been in recent years "too much unqualified admiration of things American"; and those of our educational authorities who are in the habit of emphasising over-strongly the claims of commerce and athletics in our schools and colleges might pause to consider "whether in pursuit of the accessories of education they are not losing sight of its realities.

But the evils of whicj. this observer complains go a great deal further and deeper than this. In every department of educational life the tendency to-day is to snatch eagerly at any superficial and meretricious novelty, and especially if it is "made in America," to sacrifice to it all the fruits of centuries of past experience and the fundamental principles of true education as well. We need only instance the enthusiasm displayed in certain quarters over the crude and farcical "mental tests" which are being imported into our educational system, the attempts to subordinate the scientific study of psychology to purely experimental laboratory work, and the immense vogue secured by parrot-like reiteration and persistent advertisement for that most illogical and pernicious of all the pseudo-sciences, psycho-analysis. There are many men and women interested in education here who profess to hold with these strange and new fantastic creeds. Let them seriously ask themselves Dr. Cairney's question: Whether they are not too readily following the modern craze for "things American" and thereby rejecting and ignoring the tmie basis of all education, those "old-fashioned things which have stood the test of time."