VACATION COURSE

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19724, 14 September 1929, Page 18

VACATION COURSE

ADDRESS TO TEACHERS.

BRITAIN'S GIFT TO THE WORLD. i (rEOM orra own cobrjeseondeht.) j LONDON, August 1. Tut Misses M. Anderson and A. Kennedv (New Zealand) are among nearly 350" students from all parts of the world, in attendance at the City of Lon- i don Vacation Course. Some twenty countries are represented. This course, now in its eighth year of existence, aims to give teachers from all countries opportunities of learning the most modern education theories and methods; to bring teachers into contact with the life of a great city; and to afford facilities for educational visits to the chief literarv and historical monuments. To accomplish these aims, the programme each year is made to include courses of lectures by persons who have distinguished themselves m educational experiment and research. A scholarship value £3OO, provided by Mr Irving T. Bush, is awarded annually to enable a British teacher to go to America to carry out research in educational methods. Mr H. A. L- Fisher, Warden of New College. Oxford, delivered an address on "The British Commonwealth," as distinct from the British Empire. "England is a country," said Mr Fisher, "which has spread through the world Parliaments, railways, factories, co-operative societies, and safety _ bicycles; the use of tobac-co and afternoon tea; the practice of athletic sports and aseptic surgery: child welfare work, boy scouts and girl guides; the jury system, the Salvation Army, highclass tailoring, and Gilbert and Sullivan operas. "It is favourably considered abroad for the plays of Shakespeare and Bernard Shaw, the poems of Milton and Byron, the biology of Darwin, the philosophy of Herbert Spencer, and the fiction of Scott, Dickens, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Galsworthy, and Wells. "But perhaps the principal contribution of our island to the life of man upon this planet is that it has contrived to gather more than 450,000,000 humau beings into a common policy so that, albeit differing from one another in cverv particular of colour, race, and language, they obey a common political superior and are schooled in peaceful methods for the settlement of their disputes." The British system of Government was a method of discussion among ourselves, and that idea had been carried to the Dominions across the seas. A thing which struck the traveller very forcibly was the seeming absence of military power. The three hundred and twenty millions of inhabitants of India were policed by a force not much larger than the Aldershot Command, aud these were mostly placed on the Northwest Frontier. The truth was that we were bound by infinitely better bonds, namely, the Crown, which was, in its highest sense, the vital bond which kept the Empire together.