ALL FORGOTTEN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 112, 14 May 1934, Page 5

ALL FORGOTTEN.

SCHOOL LEARNING.

WOMAN TEACHER'S INQUIRIES

UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE.

"What we teach is of little moment compared with what we are," said Miss K. Andrews, president of the New Zealand Women Teachers' Association, in an address in Wellington.

"School life is thought of as a time for the acquisition of facts, many of them devoid of interest and wholly unrelated to experience and forgotten within a very short space of time," said Miss Andrews. "Pursuing a theory that

the time occupied in tlie laborious accu- | mutation of a dead weight of undesired : information is largely waste time, I | have been at some pains to question j adults as to their past school days; to J find out what they remember of those j past years. I found my theory sup- , ported by such a wealth of corrobora- j tion as to merit its emergence into the clear daylight of accepted fact. "Not one person whom I interrogated could remember so much as a single lesson he or she had ever ieeci\eu. Nobody could tell me the provisions of the Bill of Rights, or the battles of the Wars of the Roses, or what became of the Gulf Stream, or the position of the Karakorum Mountains, or how many drains made a pennyweight. And when they turned on me with the same questions, I couldn't answer them either! And Nobody Cared. "A curious phenomenon was the supreme indifference of everybody, myself included, to this exposure of I ignorance. Nobody seemed to feel that

the slightest importance attached to familiarity with any such facts or that any discredit accrued from having sloughed off the superficial and compulsory acquaintance we had once had with them. "Why, then, have schools? If we etav ftor an answer perhaps it will come to "us in Richard Aldington's, words, 'Just as there are two intermingled lives in each person, one of the obvious social man, the other of the mvsteiious unique personality, so there are two educations: one of formal tuition, the other of unconscious influence, and in each case the latter is by far the nioie important.' "Unconscious influence —not the syllabus, but the human being; not the curriculum. but character; not the teacher but the woman. Just as 'the lives of Christians are the only Bible which the world reads,' so the lives of teaclieis constitute the final standard by which our schools are judged. "The grudging attitude of the average taxpayer to the education system may be attributable to unhappy recollections of childish boredom and even of childish wrongs, to memories of unjust and impatient teachers, to a feelingunconscious but- potent that the balance of power having swung from the pedagogue to the erstwhile pupil, the former in his turn should suffer. Not a Christian attitude perhaps, but a very human one. Pupils Become Judges. "If my assumptions are reasonable, then truly each generation of teachers pays literally as well as metaphorica ly for the sins of the fathers, for adults rarely enter our schools, apart from official inspectors, and the public assessment of schools and teachers is made by laymen whose judgment is deeply tinged by childish recollections a generation out of date. Thus in very truth, our pupils become our judges. i "If, then, we wish to ensure better | treatment for schools, and school ■ teachers in years to come, it behoves us, the present generation of teachers, to'consider this judgment of children, to earn their high regard, so that because we have merited their good opinion, the next generation of school children will not be deprived of educational advantages, and the next generation of teachers will not be underpaid and overworked, as we are, but will enjoy a position commensurate with the importance of their work."