The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 1914.

Evening Star, Issue 15539, 8 July 1914, Page 6

The Evening Star WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 1914.

As we were among the first to commend the movement for the Columba Girls’ establishment of aPvesCollsgG. bytesrian Girls’ College, we shall not, wo think, be exceeding the limits of secular journalism if wo extend our congratulations to the committee of the Dunedin Presbytery and to tho Rev. A. Whyte on having successfully accomplished perhaps tho most difficult part of their solf-imposed task. We are not, of course, specially concerned with nor interested in tho fact that, the new Girls’ College is to be a Presbyterian institution. Its particular denominational color is, from our standpoint, of secondary importance. It is, however, in our judgment, cause for congratulation that another’ education centre is to take tangible form in our midst. We can hardly have too many of these, provided that they are founded on sound educational principles, axe under the direct supervision and influence of men or women whose known reputation is their own certificate of fitness, and the whole is governed by those whose outlook is wide, whose ideals are high, whose minds are inceptive to the best that is new, and whose reverence for the past does not blind them to tho need of meeting and satisfying the changed and changing world in which we live and move and have our being. The Dunedin Presbytery are prepared to take the risk implied in the query Is such a college wanted? There are differences of opinion upon this point, and one answer, perhaps, would be: It depends. It the objects of the promoters of the Presbyterian Girls' Col] ego were tho. founding of a’ strictly denominational educational institution, and the annual turning out of so many matriculating University students, Civil Service “ passes,’’ and scholarship holders, then we should feel disposed to say that such an establishment is not wanted. Dunedin does not want to help forward nor to add to that sort of thing. But the community cannot have too many institutions in which character-formation and the cultivation of those sweet and gracioul traits which do so much to soften the asperities of daily life and make it bearable are the dominant features. And this, the foundation and crown of all education, we. look for from the new college. Lord Bryce, than whom there is no higher authority, in tho course of one of his many addresses, spoke of that large number of maiden ladies who in England, in the days that are gone, kept “private “ boaldmg and educational establishments “for young ladies. - ’ These women and their schools may not have been great in scholarship results, he said, but beyond question they did splendid work in the training of character an<! in turning out a most excellent stamp of womankind. It was the same statesman, on another occasion ta meeting in aid of the building fund of the Girls’ Public Day School Trust ), who remarked that “at this moment the “so-called human or literary subjects were “being ground to pieces, so to speak,

“ between, two millstones; the one was “the study of natural science and the “ other was the passion for athletic sports.” In other words, the spiritual and the Intellectual were being ousted by the physical and material. Columba Girls’ College will, we imagine, fight shy of and "altogether avoid this. It was Professor E. H: Griffiths, president of the education section at the last meeting of the British Association, who said : “Wo are proceeding in “the wrong order, in that we give greater “prominence to the acquisition of know- “ ledge than to the development of char“acter." Well, if we are, we are blundering badly. Wo ourselves stand for the formation of character as the chief end of education first and always. If our schools, as Bernard Shaw says of them at Home, are dens of torture for our children, then the sooner we face the fact and fight against it the better will it he for us as individuals and as a nation. Columba College may have not impossibly a far-reaching influence over and effect upon the future citizenship of this part of the Dominion—not as wide, perhaps, as that of fho saint (Irish as well as Scotch) after whom the college is named, but an appreciable and extensive one. The all-important and decisive factor will be the personality of the lady to whom the work is to be entrusted ; and should the hopes of the Presbytery in this regard be realised, the success of fheir i new deytartuve will be assured.