STUFFED MINDS

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 65, 17 March 1934, Page 9

STUFFED MINDS

MEMORISED FACTS

YET NO UNDERSTANDING

In a Founder's Day*address at Trinity Grammar School, Summer Hill, Sydney, on March 3, Bishop Crotty, of Bathurst, while not claiming to have a constructive substitute, attacked examinations, and the training of minds to carry facts neatly tabulated but not . understood. The type of adult described by Rudyard Kipling as'- " cleanly bred, machinely crammed" is not admired;' by the Bishop. : ■'. '■} ' ■ •, " '■■'. ■■ While admitting that the virtues of tho education system were manifold, and expressing'his admiration'*for, the bulk of the teaching' profession, the Bishop said ha feared thatL some at least of the trends of the system 'of education, were having effects on both culture and adolescence that w.ere likely to/be -devastating. "There'^is tragic and growing confusion," he said, "between education and mere fact cramming, between knowledge and mere information. Fact-gathering is reducing much of modern scholarship to mere triviality. It is diverting education from the more educative process- of understanding the facts; The result is that we are not turning out, on the whole, really thoughtful people. We have been breeding intellectual dyspeptics, filled with undigested and unrelated facts. Half our democratic failure springs froin'the educational heresy that salvation depends on information. It does not. It depends on knowledge and wisdom. And our whole educational aim and method need- reconstructing to serve these major ends. "There nrust be examinations until some Utopian'substitute for theiii has materialised," Bishop Crotty added. "I do not plead for their removal, but for a mitigation of their early severity,.a relief from their inquisition, and a withdrawal from, that entire.'field of the child's mind and life, which at present they occupy and drain. : I protest against the -insatiable demands of the examination Moloch, that some margins for culture and real education might still be left. I protest against the number of young victims'who, year by year, are sacrificed to .that Moloch's ritual and_ that, Moloch's worship.,- I protest, against the increasing: tyranny of the expert in education, and plead for the coming of the humanist in his stead. 'There is a growing rebellion against our whole examination system.- It is largely inarticulate as yet, but it is a revolt that is becoming vocal m many countries, and we would be wise to take some notice of it. The examination fetish is one, however, that will not easily be dethroned. , The men protecting it are the men of whom the poet T. S. Eliot spoke: 'The hollow men, the stuffed men.' They can only be stuffed because they are hollow, and they are stuffed with facts." ' : '