ENGLISH EDUCATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 134, 8 June 1932, Page 5

ENGLISH EDUCATION.

TRADITIONS OUTLINED

FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES

LECTURE BY REV. H. K. ARCHDALL.

English educational principles and methods formed tho subject of an address by tho Rev. Canon H. K. Archdall, M.A„-at the Auckland University Collego last night. The address was held under tho auspices of the Auckland Institute and Museum, and the largo company present included the Governor-General, Lord Bledisloe. "Wo have a great national tradition of education and we are in danger of neglecting it, of permitting its structure to become impaired and its foundations to be shaken," said Mr. ArchdalL

Mr. Archdall defined the tradition of the English educational system as a striving to bring the whole man into most helpful relation with his whole environment. It aimed at life at its fullest and best. Both man and his environment functioned as a whole, and the English tradition of education, more than any other, insisted on treating man as an organism and man's environment as equally a unity.

"There will always survive the two aristocracies of character and intellect in the midst of all modern democratic principles," said Mr. Archdall. In the best English schools there was no attempt to isolate the intellectual and develop it apart from other aspects of the personality (as France and Germany had tended to do). The English "schools had nobly withstood all tendencies to "soft pedagogy." On the matter of examinations, he said that these were treated as a natural element in education, and were taken in their stride. "Cramming," however, was not looked upon as an educational achievement. "The fourth ingredient in the English tradition of education is athletics," said Mr. Archdall. It was not true that the English tradition in athletics came down to us from the Greeks, for the Greeks had no team spirit or sense of combination. English athletics descended from the noble tradition of chivalry of the medieval knight, who aimed at being perfect in bodily accomplishment. He said that boys must prove themselves both morally and physically fit to play the game of life as it should be played. "Service in the schools is the atmosphere of Christian self-sacrifice," said the lecturer. "It teaches that a gentleman is a man who pute in a little more than he takes out; that life is an adventure in co-operation; that unselfishness is the first quality required in an educated man; and that 5h..".10w individualism is the greatest danger which threatens both our education and our whole society."