KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 135, 5 December 1933, Page 8

KNOWLEDGE AND WISDOM

(To the Editor.) • Sir,—l cheerfully challenge your readers to date the quotation that follows. Who that'read it when'first printed would have ventured to forecast that all our educational tomorrows were to be as today? "All:, our tomorrows" oho '• despairingly feels, "forever":— ' . : ' "The love ,of learning for its own Bake is not awakened among the scholars; what is, learned is not mentally: digested, but simply exists ag lumps of facts in the mental stomach of the scholar;, unappropriated by the system; and generally a spirit of hurry and want of reflection is set up by the present; method, which is fatal to the acquisition of the highest results of education. . "That the system is a bad one appears also from the fact that it lays down one rule and one measure for all children, quick and slow alike, and ignores the thousand varieties of mind that exist aniong children as amongst adults. All are required to learn "the same amount in a twelve-month—the slow must be_ driven, the quick must be held back, in order that the bedstead of Procrustes .may fit them all. ... . "To learn and to teach are both delightful exercises when pursued under natural conditions, and school life to teachers and scholars alike ought to be happy life,, and would be so here in New Zealand at preaerit were it not the torturing ordeal which is ever before the minds of both.' "Abolish this, and you will secure in your schools not only knowledge but wisdom; your scholars will learn how to think as well as how to remember; and, however small, their attainments, what they know they will know thoroughly, and they will have attained the great boon, of .intel-lectual-culture. ... "So strong is my belief in the evils of tho present system, so entirely in _my judgment does it neutralise the blessings 'that our educational system was meant to confer upon us. so completely do we sacrifice the education to theiest, the substance to the method of weighing it, that I would rather see no test at all than the continuance of the present one." These words were written not yesterday by a pedagogue in a depressed mood but by Inspector Gammell, of Southland, nearly fifty years ago Was he another preposterous visionary far in advance of his time or has there in New Zealand been scholastic time-lag Of half a century ? Will upholders of "proficiency?" and "intermediate" and "matriculation" and "university diploma" exams please answer1? — OBSOLESCENT.