"PER ANGUSTA AD AUGUSTA."

Auckland Star, Volume LXIX, Issue 206, 1 September 1938, Page 17

"PER ANGUSTA AD AUGUSTA."

Girls' Grammar School Jubilee. (By MARY DAVIDSON.) To-morrow the drive of the Auckland Girls' Grammar School will ring to the sound of unfamiliar footetepe as Old Girls of almost every year since the foundation of the school foregather to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. On Saturday the ceremony of signing the jubilee roll book will be held and the official photograph taken; in the evening there will be a reunion tea in the school hall, when the birthday cake with its 50 candle* will be cut and ceremoniously handed round as befitting the solemnity of the occasion. There will be a commemorative service at St. Matthew's Church on Sunday morning, and Monday is to be a special day for present girle and their parents. The feature w ill be the opening of the jubilee library, which is the gift of the school to celebrate the jubilee. When I ait on Saturday among old friends I feel I may be guilty of reminiscing rather too much and too long. But it is forgiveable, I think, to become a little sentimental on an occasion such as this. One cannot look back on one's schooldays without experiencing some feelings of regret. Then we were not caught up in the web of commercialism, time was not money, and it was profitable to read Virgil, solve geometry "riders" and concoct "stinks" in the lab. Alas, "Are Gratia Artis" has long been replaced by what the public—or the boss —wants.

Schooldays to most people are the happiest and spiritually the richest of their live*. If they are not, it reflects very adversely on the school. For if .a school ie worthy the community it serves, it gives to its students something exclusive and intrinsic, apart from mere learning, which forms a background for the whole pattern of their future activities. It teaches them a true eense of values, encourages a broadminded attitude towards, and respect of, other people's principles and ideas, and deprecates any tendency to the snobbishness and priggish ness that have become so much a part of the school spirit not only in England but in the colonies. It is not the prejudice of an old pupil for the school which makes me say that the tineet types of young womanhood have passed through its doors for half a century and have gone into the world convinced—as we all are of our own— that it ie "the best school of all," yet entirely lacking in that deplorable superiority with which many schools invest their pupils.

The Old School Tie. There is no doubt that the "old school tie" has been offensively overdone. Tradition, surely, has become very insidious when it is assumed that mere attendance at a particular school qualifies a pupil for some particular distinction. But if to be associated with a glorious tradition, to seek to carry it on and never to fail it, either during schooldays or afterwards, gives to a student a high sense of honour and urges him to adopt the axiom which Henry Newbolt created in respect of hi* own school, then it is rightly so. And it is not far wrong, I think, to 6ay that the breaking down of old conventions and social barriers existing between certain public schools, particularly in England, would be one step further towards international amity. For how is it possible for a nation which is divided against itself in understanding hope to be successful in promoting international understanding? Colonial schools, unhampered as vet by traditoin, should eurely lead th» way. What the school ie, so will bo those who pass through it, for no_i»eriod of life is so impressionable as adolescence. It is a poor ideal for any school to have to count its success ami efficiency by the number of its old pupijs, who have achieved fame. What really count are the aims and inspiration which the rank and file acquire and carry away with them when they leave school.

It is & -far cry from the days of the old Queen Street High School and the Symonds Street Grammar School to the present school in Howe Street. Not that half a century is a long period of time by modern standards, but the history of those fifty years would fill a goodish-sized book. For the A.G.G.S. came into being in the stormy days of the first stirrings of the Feminist movement, when secondary education for girls was deemed by most parents to be unessential. Its routine was unorganised and unregimented, there were no staff of prefects, debating societies, speech contests and elaborate prize list; and organised games were almost out of the question because of the lack of suitable playing fields. But "Per Augusta ad Augusta" was not inaptly chosen as a motto; and the dearest knowledge Aiat older old girls of the school possess is to have been one of that vast worldwide army that succeeded in forcing the recognition of the equality of women with men in the academic sphere. Even I r who have not left school so very long, feel that the point which should be stressed at the jubilee of a girls' school is its contributory effort towards the emancipation of women. Looking on Familiar Scenes. Only yesterday, it seems, we were thirds envying the freedom and kidependence of those Olympians, the Sixth. Now we are old girls, some of us in more senses than one. It gives one a strange feeling of dissociation and remoteness to go back to the old school —to look again on familiar scenes and yet to be no longer a- part of them. As , Charles Morgan says in "The Fountain"; "In each instant of their lives, men die to that instant. It is not time that passes away from them, but they who recede from the constancy, the immutability of time, so that when afterwards they look back upon themselves it is not themselves they see —not even -as it is customary to say —themselves as they formerly were, but strange ghostg made in their image, with whom they have no communication." Hollywood has a word —or rather words —for it: "Time marches onl . . ."

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And with the passing of time, memory j grows capricious. The most trivial | things are apt to crowd into one's mind. The heaters, for instance,, which seemed to_ make absolutely no impression on a winter day; repeating p«-oficiscor, proficisci, profectus sum 20 times for not 1 knowing it; writing out an equation 500 times for talking in science—(I did it wrong too, and had to repeat); crediting Stephen Leacock in an examination j paper with having written one of I Raleigh's poemsf surreptitiously robbing | the loquat trees of their luscious fruit. ;

Out of the long cavalcade of schooldays, the one I remember most vividly is the last. The last day ... the school sonp, speeches, presentation of prizes, good byes—"No, I'm not coming back. ..." At the gate I turned to look on the scene which I should never look on again except as an old girl. ' The gigantic pines were dark against the cloudless sky, the silver poplars tossing in the high breeze, the roses dropping along the drive, the green lawns dotted with gym clad, black stockinged girls, the air filled with the sound of laughter and happy voices . . . and in the mjdst of it all—the school, dignified, immutable, in a sense, ageless. O mihi praeteritos referat si Jupiter annos!