REAL EDUCATION

Evening Post, Volume CXXV, Issue 146, 23 June 1938, Page 23

REAL EDUCATION

«, SOULS OR COGS? HEADMASTER'S VIEWS "Unless we altei* our outlook upon education and apply its power more f directly to our own lives and to the 3 lives of our children, we can hope " for no betterment or amelioration of our social and economic conditions," f said Mr. F. Martyn Renner, principal • of Rongotai College, at the annual 3 meeting of the Rongotai College Parents' Association last night, i "When we talk of education or re- • gard education as a search for know- ' ledge, Ve are misconceiving and mist applying that force," he continued. "No ; amount of knowledge will ever bene- • fit the world unless the great mass of \ people can derive benefit from such a \ storehouse. And therefore the acceleration of the machine age, the drive into . the unknown fields of research and I investigation, scientific discoveries and , inventions, may perhaps constitute a very valuable advance guard to man- ' kind in its march along the road of civilisation: but an advance guard can ' leave too big a gap between itself and the main body and so leave that main body open to attack by hostile forcfes. I maintain thai; this analogy holds today. Misapplied and misconceived education has not kept the people of the world in close enough touch with its vanguard and the people of the world have been attached by social, economic, and financial forces that have thrown the great army into confusion. "I am one of those who believe that a rightly conceived and a rightly applied .form of education can still be effective in bringing order out of chaos. I believe that if we bring education more closely into relation with our lives, and not so much with our livelihoods, we shall be able to achieve

' something; remove much of the unpleasantness from our political lives, our social lives, and our . economic lives. Rightly-conceived and rightlyapplied education will remove the conception that wages and salary are of greater importance than the work itself. I firmly believe that this aspect is at the root of much of our social discontent today. We could live very much happier lives it our education could make us realise ,two things: (l) That the work itself, done by the individual, is of greater account than the profit or wages received for it; (2) that work should not be undertaken for individual gain, but should be regarded as the individual's contribution in the way of service to the community. NOT ONLY MATERIAL, "Let us* pursue the matter a little farther. You, as parents, whether you are fathers or mothers, employees or employers, cannot cut yourself adrift sufficiently from the material aspect of the world to persuade yourself that it is more important for your boy to be taught how to live than it is for him to 'get a good job,' with a good salary and prospects of rapid advancement. And I say quite frankly that, as long as you insist on a training for livelihood in place of an education for living, the learning how to live, so long will education be misapplied. After all, man's only excuse for being alive is that he may serve, and this training for service in either a humble or an exalted position is the only real meaning of education. Make this the fundamental principle of every child's upbringing; ensure for the child a well-balanced rrforal, spiritual, and mental development, give the child a sound body, and then wages, position, social standing will become mere secondary considerations.

MORE THAN A COG. "I am prepared to affirm that a child so educated will be of infinitely greater value to the employer than the product of our present system. The difficulty, of course, is to make most employers see it in that light. What is the type of youth that the majority of employers look for today? A boy who is not too old, can write a good hand, aria is quick at figures: if he has passed the matriculation examination, so much,the better—in fact, that qualification is sometimes almost indispensable. I want you to notice that not one of the desired qualifications have any connection with education in the right sense of the word. It seems almost as if the boy is regarded as a cog, wheel in the business machine—ajl attention being paid, as it were, to size and dimension and none to the quality of the material of which the cog-wheel'is made. The business world is here in direct conflict with the true aims of education. And now here is another aspect. In education, we definitely teach the boy that the conscientious effort to progress is of greater value than the result achieved—that a boy and a man should be judged not on results but by the effort made to achieve results. The slogan of the business world always is 'Get results,' and he gets results or does not get results. "I have said enough to show you why I confess to a feeling of impatience with parents and employers who demand a type of education (so-called) that is shorn of all its finer parts, and is confined almost entirely to the materialistic. To tell me that a child is of value only in propqrtion to its ability to pass examinations, to get a job, and, earn a salary Is a libel on the child. How qan our own country ever progress if we continue this sacrifice of immature lives on the altar of parental and economic or business materialism?" -»