VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

Press, Volume LIV, Issue 16213, 16 May 1918, Page 4

VOCATIONAL EDUCATION

In tlio last number of "Thistledown,"' the magazine of St. Andrew's College, Christchurch, the editor, in his editorial notes, has some trenchant remarks regarding the system of vocational education. He says:—"lt is interesting to remember that before the war, Germany was the country to which, more than to any other, critics and enlightened experts and investigators turned for models of the realised ideals of education. With pious zeal, also, the German himself stood witness to his own perfection. But the closing months of 1914 shattered the world's belief in the efficacy of German methods. The flood of barbaric bestiality, and callous criminalism, and exultant evilness of soul that burst over Belgium, and Northern France —was that the fruit of generations of nurture'under systems or education acclaimed to the world as ideal ? Since those days exports have been revising earlier judgments, and along with their readjust-' ments many factors arising out of tho welter of new national conditions have helped to raise the insistent question —'What ends should . education pursue?' Now, the answer given by somo to this question has unhesitatingly favoured school courses which are definitely preparatory for such trades and businesses as the pupils will pursue on leaving school; and in New Zealand, under the title of 'Vocational Education/ we find this view being emphasised with increasing confidence. Perhaps it rnay become a shibboleth in time; but it is a false ideal, and it carries with it the sinister significance that German kultur and efficiency were nourished on such pabulum. The Germans intensely cultivated their genius for tho beastly necessities of life; but the higher necessities of the individual spirit and of the national conscience became atropnied and calloused in the prbcess, and the amazingly efficient workman proved how ho could be an amazingly deficient rascal. Tt is well that this cry of 'Vocational Education' should be not too trustingly taken. .There is a time in life wlipn one must begin to specialise for one's lifework, but we think that thatvspecialisation ought naturally to develop out of that body of reasonably-matured moralities that it is the function of one's school days to produce. _ The fruitgrower first matures a vigorous stock that thereafter he mnv gfaft upon it the variety of fruit that may do required. iSimijnrly, tho problem of tho schoolmaster is to produce tho stock fit for grafting. If he doos that faithfully lie fulfils his function. Criticised as .British educational ideals have been, there has yet consistently developed out of them a noble product, never displayed to 'better advantage than by the spirit 0f..01d public school boys in this war. Their nigh sense of public duty, their strong feeling of individual responsibility, and their devotion and loyalty to the corporate spirit of tho community are shedding a more permanent and" more genuine lustre upon their schooling than ever their power to accumulate riches could."