HOW THE JAPANESE LEARN.

Dominion, Volume 2, Issue 484, 17 April 1909, Page 5

HOW THE JAPANESE LEARN.

a ■■■ ■■■■■■■ ■ ■■;:•■.■■ : : ; v v '■' ... .■:;;. ■,: ■',' ".What is the good of a pupil,\vJiQ > 8 A 0 genius at fourteen and an invalid or an .'m- ■■ becile at twenty-four P" asked Bishop 'Well-;, .- » don (Dean of Manchester) at the recent 8 North of England Education Conference; Ho '" said that never perhaps in tho history of the , world had education i been so greatly valued > as to-day. Tho nations of mankind had and- • ' denly awakened to' tho discovery that ; tkf race would in tho future bo not to the swift nor to the strong, but to tho-highly edu- ! . cated. Commerce, law, statesmanship, warfare, philosophy itself, had becomo scientific. ; It was thus that the nations of > tho Far East—lndia,- China, and Japan, most of all— , after long centuriesi of . stagnation^',had dc- ' veloped or showed signs" of; developing 'a pas--1 sion for'knowledge. Ho was greatly im- , pressed in Japan iiy tho teachableness of all ! classes of the people, 7 In England young' . men who had just come of ago, and, surely . not least"young officers, were often "too: im-, r patient or too.proud to take the trouble of. learning, but in Tokio ho was invited to atej tend a lecture- upon English in the Naval College; Tho class consisted of somo twenty studonts, ranging in age from twenty to > forty, some of them officer's who had served i with distinction at Port Arthur. 'Yet tho professor, who was an Englishman, treated \ them much as ho (the Bishop)' might have ' treated his Harrow boys. Ho put them, on ' to read'passages of an English maganino.'; - He corrected theirmistakes; ho mado thorn 3 pronounce after him, perhaps thveo or' four ' , times,i tho words they had mispronounced; , ho asked them 'questions upon tho meaning of tho passages which they had; read, ana thoy answered him, and ho told them what was wrong in their answers.. All this thoy ■■ did in tho presence of their clas6-fcllows with [ porfect naturalness and docility, nn"3 without : the least apparent sense of doing anything ' that could lie regarded'as laughable or uh--1 dignified: It was tinio that !tbc State should'! ■ ackuowledgo education to 1 bo not'a - local in- ) torest, but national,:and even Imperial, by laying a far larger sharo of its necessary cost upon tho exchequer. .-."•■ i