THE HORRIBLE PRIMER.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3334, 16 August 1926, Page 8

THE HORRIBLE PRIMER.

(Loudon Daily Telegraph.) If our children now at school do not think themselves very fortunate it is not the fault of their pastors and masters. Hardly ja week goes by but some pedagogue is moved to declare how vastly superior are all the modern schools and teachers to any of the past, how comfortably royal a road to learning they have made. Though we do not observe in the children an enthusiastic confidence about it, no doubt this is so. Here is an inspector of the London County Council, Mr George Sampson, discovering yet another cause for thanksgiving from the schools. There is a new freedom in education. The authorities have decreed “the literal banishment for ever of horrible little primers, which used to be the sole reading of the child during the school period.” Thus the fashions pass and go. In school books, as all parents know too well, they endure for a very little while. A lew short terms make obsolete for the younger brother the text-book which was the latest thing when wo bought it for the elder. It was not ever thus. Corderius held the held for three good centuries. Even Lindley Murray was in for full fifty years. How many generations learnt their spelling and their morals from Mayor? MaiigualPs Questions and Mrs Markham were heritable like a bridal veil, and Little Arthur’s history suihced lor the grandchildren of those who firj3t used it. But all these were banished long ago in that enlightened age when all the leaders of thought set themselves to indite comprehensive, authoritative pi’imers, each man for his own subject, and Huxley (was it?) a sort of primer of primers, a compendious introduction to everything. On these we who are grown middle-aged and sceptical began the long process of education and disillusion, these in our innocence we believed infallible and eternal, if not verbally inspired. We, too, in our day, were told how lucky we were to possess such brilliant and fascinating school books. And now that Mr George Sampson is calling them “horrible little primers,” he must forgive us if we exhibit no perfervid enthusiasm over the change of fashion. Some of our primers were good, some are far better buried. That the best of primers must needs bo inadequate and deceptive was always obvious to the criticial mind. It is much to be desired that boys and girls should be encouraged to read widely, as Mr Sampson says they are now. But he is mistaken in assuming that for such reading they used to he punished. The boy or girl whose studious ambitious range so far as. to need restraint was, and is, the rarest of birds. But we have no doubt that fifty years hence another inspector of the London County Council will be telling another generation how fortunate their children are to enjoy at last “freedom in education,” to be delivered from the “horrible little primers” of Mr Sampson’s day. Man never is. but always to be, blest.”