EDUCATION OF TO-DAY.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 46, 24 February 1936, Page 6

EDUCATION OF TO-DAY.

AN ENGLISH SYMPOSIUM

In January of last year there was held at Harrow School the third conference of young public school masters, who were addressed by eminent educationists, and also by men of business, science and religion. The substance of their addresses, fifteen in all, has been published under the title of "Education of Today." * To read this book is to realise how keenly alert English teachers have become to the need for bringing education into touch with modern life in both subject and method. The greatest change, as the editor remarks in a foreword, is to be found in the loosening of the old academic bonds and a tendency towards realism in education. "It is not merely a trend towards a new curriculum that is noticed, but also a new spirit of approach to the studies of the i)ast.'"

Dr. J. Dover Wilson, professor of English literature at Edinburgh University, told the conference that "a large number of the young men and women leaving our universities, old and new, are not really educated at all; that is to say, they have never learned to think independently or to appreciate spontaneously." (This is a familiar criticism of New Zealand students, and New Zealand teachers may find some slight consolation in the knowledge that it is applied to the students of much older and wealthier universities.) Premature specialisation, said Dr. Wilson, was the latest and greatest enemy of true education. "Almost within a single generation the nation has suffered a double disaster: it has lost the traditional basis of its culture by its neglect of the Authorised Version, and it has lost the traditional centre of its school curriculum by its surrender of the classics. . . . English, especially the writing of English prose, must become the central and essential subject of the school curriculum. . . . It must take the place of Latin, and must perform the function that Latin has for centuries performed."

Perhaps the idea running through many of the lectures was expressed best by Mr. T. F. Coade, headmaster of Bryanston School, who said: "The creed of modern education is, first, belief in the development of the individuality or personality of the child, and, second, belief in training the young to be co-operative members of a group. The first belief is not necessarily more important than the second; but the second is dependent on and implicit in the first. ... It is the task of education to produce whole men, whoso citizenship is learnt not only from school books and sport but from years of daily creative and co-operative experience at home and at school, in working [hours and in leisure: men and women who are emotionally as well as intellectually free."

* "Education of To-day." Edited by E. D. Laborde. (Cambridge University Press.)