LEARNING FOR LIFE

Dominion, Volume 29, Issue 94, 15 January 1936, Page 10

LEARNING FOR LIFE

A Stock-taking of

Education

“NOTHING ON THE SHELVES”

Behind Scholastic Bars

(By B.A. for The Doaumox.)

it will probably be found in the educational stock-taking now in progress that there is nothing Ou the shelves but universal literacy; and many a parent of a live-year-old or seven-year-old will be asking himself whether seven or ten years’ incarceration behind the scholastic bars is not too high a price to pay for the ability to read the daily newspaper. Some will remember their own grammargrinding days of not. so Jong ago, and will wonder if tilings have changed. They have. Never before has there been such efficiency in tlie teaching of the traditional subjects. Modern methods originally designed to serve a wider and higher ideal of education have been pressed into the service of the antiquated examination round; everyone now can read and write, but it is blinking the facts to suggest that the modern 'methods, working within tlie confines of the old system, have done much to foster the capacity for sustained and logical thinking. How could they? The fault is not in the methods or in tlie teachers who apply them; it is in the ends to which the methods have been turned. Education iu the past has been not so much for the sake of tlie child or the nation as for the examination, that bloodless abstraction that has seldom borne much relation to human values.

Escape From the “Rigid Rigmarole,”

In recent years there has been a decided swing away from the rigid rigmarole of traditional education toward a kindlier and more tolerant view of the function of the school. Many teachers, in spite of difficulties, have infused into their schools a spirit of happy purposeful activity impossible of attainment in institutions sharply divided into teachers and taught. Even the Education Department has relented a little, and has taken steps to remove some of the backward pressure and deadening influence of the proficiency examination.

Now, with the advent, of a Government that makes no claims to omniscience, and is willing to learn, there are grounds for the hope that progressive teachers will receive the encouragement they deserve, and that, fact-stuf-fing will soon become a thing of the past. Authoritarianism Must Go. 'Tlie principles of the new movement have been admirably expressed by Sir Bercy Nunn. The old authoritarian attitude of parents and teachers, he says, should be modified, more responsibility for their conduct and progress hi school studies should be entrusted to the children themselves, methods of instruction should be more flexible so as to meet belter the widely-differing needs of individuals, and more account should be taken of varying tastes and abilities. The old system does not and cannot recognise individual differences. It succeeds only in producing a dead level of intellectual mediocrity, thwarting the quick and over-running the slow. The new movement, on the other hand, aims at extending the capacities of every single child to their uttermost. Obviously rigid class systems and rigid time-tables are quite incompatible with the principle that a child should I ravel through the world of learning iu bis own way and in his own time. They are based on the assumption that Tom, Dick and Harry are so many little automata that can be relied upon to go through the same evolutions at the same time at the bidding of the teacher. The most casual inspection of Tom and Dick should provide ample evidence of the esseutial futility of such an assumption. Individuality find Character. if we are to take more notice of individuality and character, education is likely to become au extremely complex problem, but it is surely better Io face up to such an important problem than to take refuge in the almost primitive simplicity of the present scheme. It is time that we made up our minds which way we want to go. If the three K’s are to be all-import-ant, then let us get on with the job, import and invent still more efficient methods, and put the little automata through the mill in a shorter time, so that they may the sooner be free to educate themselves. If it is decided that freedom, co-operation, emotional stability and intellectual quickness and integrity are at least as important as the capacity to read, write and reckon, thou tlie task will be harder,'but willing helpers will not be wanting. Five years ago the fairly conservative Consultative Committee to .the English Board of Education reported that tlie criterion of tlie primary school •'must above all be the requirements of its pupils during the years when they are in its charge, not the exigencies of examinations or the demands of the schools and occupations they will eventually enter. It will best serve their future by a single-minded devotion to their needs in tlie present, and the question that most concerns it is not what children should be—a point on which unanimity has hardly yet. perhaps, been reached—but what, in actual fact, children are.

“Its primary aim must be to aid children, while they are children, to be healthy and, as far as is possible, hap’py children, vigorous in body and lively in mind, in order that later, as with widening experience they grow toward maturity, the knowledge which life demands may more easily be acquired and the necessary accomplishments more easily mastered.” The report has been acted upon in many English schools, so that if New Zealand decides to follow in English footsteps there is plenty of practical evidence upon which to base a more liberal scheme of education. New Zealand may bare the fun and self-satis-faction of revolutionising education while avoiding all the pitfalls that beset the path of the revolutionary. An Opportunity for the New Government. “The new Government has already made it clear that education is to occupy a high position among the social services. The Government may broaden and diversify the administration, it may place a proper degree of cout.rol ami responsibility in the hands of the teachers, and it. may spend a great deal of money on educational facilities, but

its efforts will largely be wasted unless they are backed by enlightened and progressive public opinion. The day has gone by when education could be regarded as solely the responsibility of the teacher and the school. Education in Hie broad sense is neither more nor less than being alive, ami the school should be regarded not as a cram-shop but as a place provided by the community for the purpose of developing in children the desire for orderly freedom, for cooperation and for concentrated, purposeful activity. The school, in short, should be a growing point of the community.

What Ihe school should be and what Hie school is are two very different things. Popular belief in the value of education has to a certain extent led to an indiscriminate acceptance of all that the schools may do. Even people who have objected to relief workers being set to useless tasks have acquiesced in (be treading of much more arid paths by their own children, not because they are blind, but. because so far as education is concerned they have become custom ridden. This uncritical tolerance will have to be replaced by a real understanding and appreciation of the new movement if any good is to come out of the schools.