INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 63, 8 December 1936, Page 8

INDIVIDUAL AND THE STATE

The Part of Education PREPARING CHILD FOR SOCIETY ■•Education and Society” was the subject of an address recently by Mr. Oliver Stanley, president of the British Board of Education. Mr. Stanley said he had chosen this subject because it covered a facet of the educational problem which was particularly interesting to those closely connected with higher education. The relationship of the individual to society was perhaps the most important educational problem they had to solve to-day. Whether he liked it or not, he was born a member of an organised society and he would probably have to spend his life in it. Since, by his nature, a human being had to be taught almost everything, it stood to reason that he must learn bow to take his place in society. That problem of preparing the child for society had been recognised in all ages as one of the most important in education, but only once before in our history—in the Middle Ages—had a solution been arrived at. Out of Touch With Life. For 200 years after the Reformation education was out of touch with life. The industrial revolution brought further changes in society, but the corresponding changes in education followed slowly. It was not till 1870 that the country realised the need for a more complete system with modern aims and a modern curriculum. “Today,” he added, “we are more nearly in step than at any time since the Middle Ages. The significant date in this progress was, I think, the two years immediately before the war. The years 1913 and 1914 were years of real ferment in English life. It showed itself in many ways—suffragettes and higher skirts, industrial strikes and mixed bathing. All the indications of change were different, some desirable and some not, but all were symptoms to the close observer that Englishmen of that time were ‘assisting at the birth of a new world.” He instanced changes in content, methods, and balance as the most notable changes in education, involving recognition of the child as an organic whole, as a growing individual, and as one whom education should fit for work, leisure, and citizenship. He was more concerned, however, with the education of the adolescent and the adult. In a society which made its aim to train the individual to conform to the State education could be completed by 12 to 14 years of age, but in a society which had progressed to the second stage and aimed at fitting the individual for his environment there was no end to the task so long as the environment remained dynamic and the individual capable of development. As regarded part-time education, he felt that the most successful arrangement would be a combination of evening classes and part-time day release from work. After all, however, the majority of adolescents went neither to full-time nor part-time schools, and , for all the State and the authorities did there remained a field in which they must welcome the efforts of voluntary bodies, There it seemed to him the problem was one of co-operation with the statutory bodies. That was why he welcomed the great new activity shown l by the juvenile organisations move- I ment. The problem was to strengthen ■ those committees and to enlist on their behalf the sympathy and help of local 1 education authorities. In adult education they were still on the fringe of the problem. First of all,

there was university education, which seemed to him to present a problem of supply and demand, of the optimum limit.' “At a recent Empire Congress of Universities at Cambridge,” lie said, “I put the question whether it might not be possible to overdo our supply of this kind of education. There have been certain criticisms of my remarks, some unscrupulous, some merely .un-un-derstanding. The criticisms, put crudely in the form of a syllogism, amount to this—the university, it is said, is the best education; every individual is entitled to the best education; therefore every individual is entitled to university education. “That kind of criticism arises from a sort of inverted snobbery. It assumes that there Is a best education, a sort of educational West End, static in quality and the same for all. That, I believe, is nonsense. The best education for any individual is the form best suited to assist his particular growth. As individuals differ so does the best education. I should say that for individuals whose future will lie in research or in any form of work in which academic qualifications are paramount, the university should be open irrespective of means or social position, but to suggest an extension of university teaching to all, irrespective of their Intentions and of the claims of other types of education, seems to me the very negation of the principles I have been trying to lay down.” Defence of Democracy. “We are in a time,” he concluded, “when the word democracy is ringing in our ears. We see it. perishing there, dying there, and, we ask ourselves, will it live here? It is a terrible commentary on the change that has come over us that what was a closed book to our fathers is an open question to us. Democracy will not live because we make speeches about it or write articles about it. It will only live if we make it work, and to do that we have got to show that there is no inconsistency between the claims of the individual and the claims of the society of which he is a member. “There is no need to be on the horns of a dilemma, to repress the one or to ignore the other. The solution will not be found by natural instincts, but we have got to learn so that democracy will work just as we learn so that wo can spell, road, and write. It may be true that in this country we have great advantages. and a spirit of tolerance, of kindliness and patience, that enable us to listen to reason, but that is only tbe pencil and slate. We have got to learn to use those qualities.”