GOOD SPEECH.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 96, 24 April 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

GOOD SPEECH.

LESSON FROM IRELAND. HOW TEACHERS FAIL. (By A.H.M.) "I had hoped to save £100 during the season by judicial management," said a litigant in a Hawera lawsuit. To help him out, his counsel explained to the Court, "I think my client means 'judicious.'" This incident recalls Mr. Morton in his splendid book. That judicial observer comparing the workmen of Ireland with the workmen of England, said that when he heard English workmen quoting pages upon pages of Chaucer (and not until then), he would grant that the common people of England, with all their primary schools, were receiving as good an education as the "illiterate" Irish peasantry. This observation was made by Mr. Morton pursuant to his discovering the astounding fact that, without schools, and without being able to read or write, Irish peasants who had never moved from their native bog, or crag, could converse eloquently and understandingly, and with a wide vocabulary nicely used, about the classics of their own language. No Kindergarten. Now there are no kindergartens for the children of the Irisli peasantry, nor ever were. On tragic occasions soupkitchens. were established for them — strangely unpopular amongst a famished people; but since the days of the penal code until quite recently the only schools available to the peasants of Ireland were the "hedge-schools," so well described by Carleton in his "Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry." Yet, Mr. Morton, to-day deplores that the working man of England is ignorant compared with the working man of Ireland. Surely, here is room for thought on the part of those in New Zealand responsible for the continuance of our expensive system of education. What do the children learn ? . . . . "by judicial management!" Registrars of Courts, editors of newspapers, employment clerks of commercial houses, cross-examining solicitors — everyone who comes in contact with the written or spoken English of the man in the street, wonders what the pupils of our primary schools learn. For they certainly do not learn English. Leaving Chaucer out of the discussion, and leaving out any question of being able to repeat from memory any considerable portion of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley or Francis Thompson, how many boys and girls who have passed through our primary schools can state their own ideas, or their wishes, or their hopes in tolerably good English? Yet, every departmental head affirms (and every

teacher repeats the cry), "The chief aim of our system, and one towards the attainment of which the whole effort of our teaching staff is consciously employed, is the imparting of a good education in the mother tongue." Now if that is their aim, how and why is their failure so complete? "I never seen him," "between you and I, "aren't I?" "Don't lay there; its damp." "Mabel done it," and countless confusions like "by judicial management." Before answering my own query, let me warn the reader that the aural jar caused by such floundering is the least serious part of a most serious failure; the essence of the problem lies in the total lack of analysis, of self-criticism— and therefore of logic, and therefore of self-control—displayed by a generation faced with the hard crises that confront us to-day. I will return-to that later. Here, I want to point out the ingenious methods by which teachers succeed in defeating their own professed aim—the teaching of English. Teaching Interest. Did you ever learn to make, say, a reef knot, under the staccatoed instructions of the helmsman, what time your sailing.boat was trying to sneak through the rip off Rangitoto, and running away from a nor'-easter against an ebb tide? Vaguely (and fearfully) you are conscious that your life depends upon that knot being made correctly. There is no lack of interest on your part, nor of sulphurously precise encouragement 011 the part of your instructor; and you learned that job once and for all. The same you, comfortably seated in the boatshed, with your mind divided ljetween ithe instructor of knot-making and an image of the brown-eyed girl who promised to meet you—the same you, in those circumstances, will most likely continue to make "grannies" instead of reefs. This illustrates well what is admitted even by teachers to be the chief cause of their failures—lack of interest on the part of pupils. But interest must be real. Simulated interest (so easily given by infants who do not know what "interest" means), is the hurdle upon which both teachers.and pupils come a cropper. Yes, also inspectors; for they demand "results" —and they have not' the time to try to get behind the results to see whether they are the result of analysis, or merely the parrot-cry of memories leaning one upon another. This hurdle is an artificial hurdle; it is built by the teachers themselves. How? Well, mainly by robbing the children of their childhood. That is, by taking children into the schoolroom at too early an age. As I hinted in a,former article, this question is too long for discussion in a newspaper. But, briefly, it may be stated by saying that children should talk to dogs, to birds, to horses, to imaginary lions, tigers, and human foes, and to numberless fairies born of the story of Jack and the Beanstalk —to talk to these conceptions (and of them to other children siiailarly fre? of school

attendance), and about them at the breakfast table, during five or six years before their attention is taxed in the discipline of the classroom. The reasons for this period of "running wild" are not obvious; neither is it obvious how children will learn to read the story of The Babes in the Wood three or four years before they go to school. But it must be obvious that a habit of real interest (and what child ever , failed to be interested in the leafy grave built by llobin Redbreast?) built up during the first nine or ten years of a child's life, will never succumb to the suicidal habit of simulating interest that is inseparable from what is technically known as "social" education. Importance of Imagination. The " how," then, of the general failure of teachers to achieve their object is that they try to teach the unteachable— the child who has missed his childhood. The "why" of it, of course, is that politicians usually mistake literateness for education, and order an expensive, allembracing waste to engulf the nation's children, at an age (generally seven years) when real education demands they shall be left untrammelled to pursue their natural instinct for reflecting, comparing. auestioning, controlling .themselves (for fear of scratches, bruises, burns, thirsts, and hungers) and imaginings' —specially imaginings. Mr. Frederick Peabodyj an American lawyer, and chief contributor to "Honour or Dollars" (an examination of America's debt to the Allies) says, " Only the man of imagination can be fair-minded, for ofily he can see the other's side." Nobody would contradict him there. And will anyone deny that a man or woman without a fair mind is at best a negative influence in the community?. I,have purposely left this matter of imagination for the last word, as undoubtedly it is the most important factor in the process we call educating. All the free activities of childhood tend to build up the imaginative faculty, and all disciplined instruction tends to kill it. It is an understanding of those two facts which illuminates another dogma of pedagogy —the severely "practical" man is the least educated oj- the most ignorant. The child who begins school life with a well-developed imagmation can never become a merely " practical" man, in spite of the worst efforts of the best teachers: he will never become wall-eyed, a veagious bigot, or ?> usurer. Do I mean, then, that under our existing system of a too-early compulsory attendance at school children are bred to be wall-eyed, bigots, and worshippers of money and of their own gratifications? I do. Imagination is the essence of real education. It is a conglomerate virtue that includes analysis, meditation, comparing, deductions, and self-control; and without it, essentials like analysis and the rest never become part and parcel of the mind-habit. And therefore it is that we hear such confusion as confounded the (Hawera, Court.