Lord Cobham Queries Education's Objectives

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 28983, 26 August 1959, Page 12

Lord Cobham Queries Education's Objectives

(Aeu> Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, August 25. “Are we quite sure we know what we are trying to produce in our schools? As a parent, I am quite sure what I would like. I want my children to acquire not knowledge, but- character—a character posed and eager for performance of any duty that may lie ahead—and not merely automata trained for some specific profession,” said the Governor-General (Lord Cobham) in Wellington tonight when he spoke at the official opening of the Secondary School Boards’ conference, which begins its sessions tomorrow.

“I am unrepentantly of the opinion that stressing ethical concepts should form a basic part of education. Without it we will turn out, as the Duke of Wellington dryly remarked over a

h-.ndred years ago, ‘so many clever devils’.”

For the last 50 years man had advanced in a single direction—that of knowledge, Lord Cobham said. But man as an intellectual being had infinite space in which to expand.

“Capacity for observation and judgment has its limits. We still have to grope forward, step by step, disregarding the distant scene, and impelled by faith in God, rather than certainty about our destination.”

The only new thing on earth was the Christian religion, he said, which was new in the sense that it had never been practised, except by a handful of saints and martyrs who by their lives and ’deaths had proved Christianity’s validity to the ultimate degree. “I think that our young generation are too fine a lot to be set at the mercy of this or that theory of education. I am pleading not for discovery of new methods, but rediscovery of the old ones that have stood the test of time.

“Knowledge and learning are all very well in helping to stave off poverty, but other tools are needed to ward off the Devil. “Work divorced from the service of God, whether political, cultural or industrial, may produce a prosperous nation, but it will never produce a great one.”

Lord Cobham asked the assembly to remember in their deliberations the remark of the late Robert E. Wilson, that “culture in its highest sense is moral as well as intellectual and aesthetic.” Lord Cobham then declared the conference officially open.