EDUCATION FOR LIFE

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21087, 12 February 1934, Page 9

EDUCATION FOR LIFE

A MUSICIAN'S VIEW IMPORTANCE OF LEISURE LONDON, January 12. "Most of our children will have to earn their bread by tasks which will deaden rather than quicken their faculties. This is the greatest edu- ' cational problem of our time. We have to educate not so much for work as for leisure." This was the conclusion reached by Dr. George Dyson, Master of Music, Winchester College, in his presidential address on "Education ; for life" to the conference of Educational Associations, at University \ College, London, yesterday, when ha urged the value of music and the arts and crafts as educationajl vehicles in their own right. The arts and crafts, he claimed, involved a discipline not inferior to the most exacting forms of mental exercise. The plain fact was that, broadly speaking, education as we had inherited it was devised for clerks—--1 either for clerks in Holy Orders or for clerks in the learned professions. It was the only promising path to ' scholarships and prizes, to school- ' masterships, professorships, bishop--5 rics, and the whole hierarchy of the Civil Service. Thus every school in the land 2 spent most of its time producing " clerks. 1 If once they could envisage an f education which would think mora , of the actual characters, talents, and i future lives of their pupils and less 5 of the pens and ink of the specialist ' past, they would soon begin to . march in a new direction. ' ; ; ' !