MODERN EDUCATION

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 275, 16 August 1932, Page 4

MODERN EDUCATION

Headmistresses’ Views PERSONALITY OF CHILD Dominion Special Service. (By Mavis.) London, June 15. The study of compulsory subjects—such as Latin and mathematics —may harm a child’s personality, declared Miss O. E. Robinson, of Howell’s School, Denbigh, during the Head Mistresses’ Conference held this week. Enforced study of such subjects is often the cause of an inferiority complex, she said. English people think little of education, said Miss E. Strudwick, high mistress of St. Paul’s Girls’ Schools, in her presidential address. “The stinting of the children’s allowance Is the last thing a father and mother would think of—it appears to be the first that occurs to the Mother of Parliaments. It was with real shame that I read a few weeks ago the remark of a distinguished economist that the first economy would be to reduce the £l5 a year now spent per child to the £5 so spent before the war. It is a mad world when men think that economy. “In comparing the children of to-day with those of the mid-Victorian age,” Miss Strudwick said “they are simple beings enough, ready to care for what is beautiful, very easily pleased, very full of life —franker, perhaps, and less constrained than their forerunners. Most certainly not cut after the same pattern.” Education for the leisure time of people who In the future will only work three or four hours a day was stressed at the conference. It was also suggested that teachers should be able to understand modern art in order to guide embryo artists.