Preparing for Better Times

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 120, 18 February 1928, Page 15

Preparing for Better Times

Three Men with Vision Point the Way in Things that Matter

This first issue of the year records three outstanding addresses which, although on the general subject of education, affect the student, the nation, the parent and the teacher, says “ Public Opinion.” They are an inspiration and show that on this subject the heart of the nation is sound.

(( y ■ “I HERE has never been a time in which Britain’s example has ■ counted for more in contemporary education,” said Sir' Michael I Sadler, Master of University College, Oxford, in his presidential JL address at the sixteenth annual conference of Educational Associations, which opened at University College, London. British educational ideas, he added, were at the present time world-wide in their influence, but Britain was hospitable to educational ideas from Europe and the United States. “Ours,” he says, “is an age of great organisations which draw their breath of life from great personalities, though they might lie half-buried in their own good deeds and hide their unselfish powers in habitual anonymity. “But organisation flattens out variety and puts some kinds of experience and talent at a disadvantage. For example, the collateral effects of the Burnham scales of salary for teachers threaten to freeze the senior part of the secondary school teaching profession into immobility, and the regulations of the Higher School certificate examinations do not give enough encouragement to talent in music and drawing or, in the case of girls, in housecraft. “It especially behoves the English to be on their guard against the injurious/effects of educational organisation on the spontaneous growth of originality and talent, as, though not at all indifferent to the welfare of children, we are not by nature and habit as much interested as some older nations in the art of teaching. NEITHER HOT NOR COLD “The English are not exactly cold about education. They are taxed too much for that to be possible. But neither are they hot about it. Like the Laodiceans they are lukewarm—neither hot nor cold. “One, though not by any means the only, reason why we English have become more interested in education during the lasf thirty years is fear. Fear is a salient characteristic of our time. We divert our attention from fear by gaiety and bustle and distractions. We mask our fear under insouciance. But whenever wc really face the facts we fear. So do the Americans, the French, the Germans and the Italians. “We fear militarism or naval blockade. Wc fear destitution. We fear Communist propaganda. And do not some of us English-speaking people fear menace from the coloured races, and feel alarmed by certain portents which seem to threaten the security of our economic position and the stability of our Imperial relationships? Some people seem even to fear work. Lately one lady went so far as to imply that wc none of us could endure our daily work if it were not for the prospect of the hours of leisure which follow it. ' Wc hear a good deal about education for leisure; but any talk of education for work is slightly de inode. “What we feared too little, perhaps, were the possible effects on English powers of originality and of independent criticism, of a too effective system of examinations, said Sir Michael. All examination systems were planned by great minds and carried out by minds less great. The great minds aimed at nothing but liberty, stimulated by pressure. The less great minds thought that the results of pressure were praiseworthy’, and found the results of liberty sloppy and inaccurate. A TILT AT GREAT MINDS “The great minds which planned examination systems rarely corrected examination papers. The actual working out of examination systems lay in other hands than theirs. Some examinations were indispensable, but when they were organised on the factory system their product might be too much adulterated by inert ideas. “The primary schools (Sir Michael said) —the schools for young children —lie at the base of the problem. Here is the point which calls for attention and generous help. We have the knowledge, the art, the devotion, to make the English primary school a model for the world—free yet disciplined, happy but painstaking, well housed, well equipped, well ventilated, well play-grounded, beautiful in decoration, active with music, rhythm, communal pride, lovely words and truthful thoughts. “But have we the generosity to undertake so vast and costly an enterprise? It is here that the problem lies, much more than in the sudden multiplication of secondary schools. The improvement of the primary schools is the most urgent need in British education, because the primary school is the true seed-plot of a liberal education. “About the roots of life and duty one may say- too much or too little,” Sir Michael proceeded, “but some of us who have to bear the trust of teaching want, at any rate, to be free to say at the right time what we think should be said, and we, on our part, are glad to learn from those who can teach us what we can say to the young and to ourselves, without telling lies. “But, for my own part, I don’t want to hold any post for which, in order to be thought fit, I have to say that I believe this or that. I ask to be judged, not by what in such a test I might choose to say or write, but what those who have watched my life think I may be trusted to try to do. “For the next few years economists assure us that rigid economy is necessary. They urge that for reasons of industry and commerce and of national revenue more saving is indispensable, but that if wc can weather the crisis which is likely to come during the next few years Brtaiin and Europe may not improbably enter upon a period of great prosperity'. The improvements in machinery since 1914 liave been revolutionary. “It is now possible to produce commodities by the services of fewer workpeople than have been hitherto necessary. . Industry in its new guise will not require so much juvenile and adolescent labour. But adult labour to correspond with the improved machinery must be highly intelligent. Therefore, the adult workpeople of the future must have been prepared by the best kind of education, primary and continuative, and wc ought to lay our plans for continuing in central schols and otherwise education for all up to 16. “If these economists arc right in their diagnosis and predictions our national task in education during the next few years is the inspiring one of preparing ourselves to make the best possible use of the better time which may be coming after the passing of one of the most perilous storms which has ever threatened the public and private prosperity of Europe.” FATHERS AND SONS At another session Mr. M. L. Jacks, Headmaster of Mill Hill School, in a lecture on “The Home and School,” reported in the Times, said: — “Many fathers, realising the difficulties they were themselves experiencing in keeping a roof above their heads, tended rather in preparing their children : for the future to engender something of a commercial and material view of ; life in which the chief motive was to make money and to lay up treasure on i earth. It was the duty of the home to lay up treasure in Heaven. ; “The motor habit had filled us with a restlessness which was constantly i longing to move from place to place. The wireless habit, moreover, encouraged ;

in us a kind of mental idleness which preferred to have things done for us if possible—alas! it was nearly always possible—in an armchair than to do things for ourselves. The same might be said of the enormous increase in cheap literature, not always very good, and in readily accessible cinemas and shows of all kinds. SPECTATORS RATHER THAN MAKESR "All those things—good though many of them were if wisely usedthreatened to make us spectators rather than makers and threatened to turn the drama of life itself into a cinma show. The boy of 14 nowadays, instead of going to church with his parents on Sunday morning, motored with his father—the boy driving— to a neighbouring golf course, and beat him there; which from no point of view was very good for the boy. “Growing up in such an environment he was apt to get his values wrong—to make the fatal confusion between value and price, and to esteem most highly those things which made the most direct and most spectacular appeal to his sense involving on his part the minimum of trouble. “The increasing number of duties shouldered by the school had bad rather the effect of producing worse homes and less responsible fathers and mothers. Many parents, realising that with the passing of the control of their boys to the school, there had also passed the devotion of their boys, set themselves to recapture this during the holidays, and they did it by trying to give the boy what they called a ‘good time’ and to arrange an unceasing round of parties and entertainments. That sort of thing led to a great deal of negative work on the part of the schoolmaster, and such work was nearly always a waste of time. “It was instructive to observe, moreover, how very little respect for their parents boys showed who came from such homes; much less respect than when things were hard, life something of a struggle, and not so comfortable or exciting. Not only was the father frightened of the boy being bored, but he was frightened of the boy’s attitude—really frightened of losing his boy. “That was a tragic and terrible fear. It became a panic which led the father to run into courses the most fatal to his object; to do many things a father should not do and to leave undone many things which a father should do. Those latter things had to be done by the schoolmaster. "In writing and thinking disparagingly of many homes his feelings had been mainly of sorrow and sympathy. He had merely drawn attention to certain symptoms of a disease which seemed to be threatening our country’s life. But all the time there were thousands and thousands of homes where there was nothing but health, strength and stability, and from those homes they got in the public schools, he believed, boys of the finest type in the world.” "The Teaching of History” was the subject of an address by Mr. John Buchan, M.P., M.A., LL.D., at the Ayr Congress of the Educational Institute of Scotland, reports the Scotsman. “Mr. Buchan said the first and most obvious reason for the study of history was that it enormously enriched their everyday life. People varied in temperament; some liked a tiling bcause it was new, and others because it was old; but he thought that the ordinary man liked to feel that the world did not begin yesterday, and that the things about him were long-descended. “It was pleasant to be able to trace a long pedigree, especially if they had great figures in their ancestry. But that privilege was only for the few. The value of the study of history was that it gave a sense of ancestry to everybody. The historical imagination not only quickened a man’s pride, but deepened his sense of responsibilty. “A second reason was that history enabled a man to understand the meaning of society and therefore to be an intelligent citizen. It taught the rudiments of politics. The State was as organic a thing as a plant or an animal. If they had that historic sense they would be chary about politics which did not recognise the organic continuity of civic life, and which assumed that the - civic organism had the simplicity of a machine. Half the mischief in public affairs came from a false simplification. THE HISTORIAN AND THE ABSTRACT IDEALIST “They had an example of the mischief that might be wrought by this simplification in the two famous 19th century conceptions of the ‘political man’ and the ‘economic man.’ The first was at the bottom of the whole creed of Prussianism, which suffered such a downfall eight years ago. The second was at the bottom of all extreme economic creeds, both the old utilitarianism and the revulsion from it. The historian was the natural corrective to the abstract idealist. “The third reason for the study of history was that it enabled them to examine catch-words. The more elaborate civilisation became the more they were at the mercy of formulas and slogans. Unless those were rigorously examined public life would be a barren thing. The study of history would make them chary about the loud vague use of formulas. It would make them anxious to see catch-words in their historical relations; it would help them tc realise the effect of phrases which had a fine rhetorical appeal but very little concrete meaning. In a word, it would enable them in public life to go in rather for clear thinking than for loud talking. “They were all far too apt to read the ideas and movements of their own time into the life of the past, and to transfer their modern sympathies into earlier ages and take violent sides. Instead of approaching politics through history, they were apt to approach history through modern politics. “There was a charge which might be brought against the study of history, and that was that it might kill reforming zeal. A far more urgent peril was the tendency to forget the past and to start their adventures in a raw, new world without any chart to guide them. History gave them a kind of chart, and they dare not surrender even a small rushlight in the darkness. A LACK-LUSTR EMODERATION “He had very little sympathy with the man who was always inculcating a lack-lustre moderation, and who had attained to such a pitch of abstraction that he found nothing worth doing, and preferred to twirl his thumbs in ironic contemplation. That was the kind of attitude which was always halving differences in a problem, and trying to find the middle course. But the middle course might be the wrong course. “It might be necessary at one moment to be a violent innovator and at another to be conservative, but the point was that they must be going somewhere, and have a chart of the course to steer by. History did not provide a perfect chart, but at any rate it gave them something better than guesswork. It was a counteractive to crude haste, but it was also an antidote to timidity and false moderation. It was a salutary bridle upon the doctrinaire, but it was a friend and a comforter to the same idealist.”