What Is The Aim Of Education?

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29383, 9 December 1960, Page 2

What Is The Aim Of Education?

Children today had a broader experience and more poise, said Miss J. P. Crosher, headmistress of St. Margaret’s College, at the school prize-giving last evening.

“We are frequently reminded that children are noticeably healthier, taller and heavier than was any generation of their predecessors. In general they are better housed, better fed, better clothed and better taught than children have ever been before,” she said.

Children stayed at school for longer and satisfies showed that the proportion who took and passed external examinations was steadily increasing, she said. “In addition, they are acquiring during their schooldays a great variety of unexaminable techniques, skills, and kinds of confidence. It has been suggested that they may not write as neatly or spell as accurately as did their parents at the same age, but the evidence is not altogether convincing. “What is convincing and encouraging, ip that these children have learnt more about science and crafts, are better informed on current events, have heard more music, have taken part in more kinds of physical exercise and have travelled more widely. “It might be thought that education is improving so satisfactorily that there is little to be concerned about so long as peace is preserved and prosperity maintained. But a deeper look may give us pause. What is the aim of the education we are giving? “Not So Rosy “If education has anything to do with a committed way of life the total picture may not be so rosy. Is it material benefits alone we are offering our children? To some parents this seems to be enough: I simply want my child to be happy at school; that’s the main thing.” This is an all-to-common atttitude which reveals no sense that life may have a purpose greater than the welfare

or happiness of the individual, or that it can imply commitment to an ideal, a way of life, a faith. “Those who deny that life calls for such a commitment would of course emphatically deny also that home or school should have any concern for it,” she said. If brought to realise it many parents and many of their children might agree that their keen, almost unassuageable desire for more comfort and success in the material sphere had a connexion with the uncertainly they felt about the great questions of the meaning and purpose of life, of faith and belief, of morality and conduct. “They are uncertain not merely about the future of the world, but about the traditions of value within which our civilisation has been nourished in the past,” she said. Family Life A family life which had some richness about it was of enormous importance educationally. “If a child has no core of loves and beliefs which is firm he is likely to be very much more subject to passing fashion: he will be influenced by his contemporaries and by advertisements and may well substitute a belief in fate, luck, chance, for others less superficial; on concentrate on work for an entirely material kind of prosperity. A child who sees no harm in stealing a car for the sake of a spree—that is, a child who is delinquent—is an extreme example of a child who is not ballasted or committed, who has no core. It seems certain that more people are ‘near delinquent’ now than in a more stable and committed time—they are attempting to give life a point and purpose it otherwise lacks. “Any school is a product first and a creator second. What it can do for its pupils is largely decided by the confidence people show in it and the expectations children have of it. A great part of all the education children get is powerfully given them by the climate of opinion of the time and by life outside the school altogether.

“The views of parents, teachers and adults generally about what are the desirable things in life certainly affect their children. In Other words, we adults are all educators whether we want to be or not. Our understanding of life, our point of view, our assumptions, will tend to transfer themselves to., the young with whom we come in contact.

“If our own philosophy of life is muddled, inevitably the education we shall pass on to our children will be confused and selfcontradictory too. “If we teach them all skills and all knowledge and life remains without meaning to us, our teaching will avail very little. For skills and knowledge in themselves are empty. They are not ends but only means to an end. What we are and do, what we believe and feel, matter more to the child’s real education than any instruction we give, however useful it may be and however efficiently we may give it. Essential education must be concerned with essential living,” Miss Gosher said.