TALK TO BOYS

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 70, 24 March 1938, Page 11

TALK TO BOYS

INFLUENCE OF SCHOOLS

CANON PERCIVAL JAMES

(From "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, February 26.

• The suggestion that links be formed between schools in England and New Zealand was made by Canon Perciyal James, formerly of Wellington, and now Vicar of Halifax, Yorkshire, at the annual prize-giving at Grace Ramsden's School, Elland, recently. Canon James appealed to the boys to look outside their own country. "England is now but a small part of the great British Commonwealth of Nations," he said. "I would like to bo a missionary to link up this or any other school round about here with any school, in New Zealand. The creation of friendship and understanding between boys of a school like this and one in New Zealand will do incalculable good." ' Commenting on the advantage which Grace Ramsden's enjoyed in its independence, Canon James said he hoped that schools like, it. would struggle as hard as they could to keep their separate status.

"I have spent 17 or 18 years in a country," he said, "where the Government has the whole of the education under its control— absolutely centralised. It is difficult to resist the deadening effect of mass production in education. If there'is one thing I have learned from my experience, it is that education is an essential spiritual process; and if that is the case,-then methods of mass production ape wrong. Some schoolmasters, I dare say, have 'had the experience of the Government inspectors coming round with one popular fad after another, simply the result of mass-minded education. _ "I do believe in a small school like this, because it enables the headmaster ito Know, and'know well, every boy in i the school, and I do think that when there are small classes, as m this school, with the ability which they give to the masters to individualise ithe charges given to their care, the education is likely to be on sounder 1 lines, and the boys'- progress is likely to be more thorough and more rapid.