THE OLYMPIANS

Evening Star, Issue 21718, 12 May 1934, Page 2

THE OLYMPIANS

[Written by Mary Scott, for the 1 Evening Star.’]

The children of to-day are of a fortunate generation. They are studied and considered and spoon-led as we never were. The beneficent shade of Sir Truby Xing hovers about their cradles: the kindergarten experts hold their little hands and tenderly guide them up the first gentle slope of learning; dental clinics peer benevolently into their infant mouths; free school doctors diagnose their adenoids. They live in an age of exports, and they arc the pivot round which the modern world revolves. School, too, has undergone an entire revolution since the time known pathetically as “ our young days.'’ Wo learnt reading from nasty little primers, not from a pleasant lady’s melodious gargling, scientifically known as phonetics; wc learnt dull grammatical French, not the highly-col-oured, excitable language of the modern school room; we wore not told charming stories about Boadicea and given the poems of A. A. Milne and cle la Mare; we learnt the dates of the Kings of England and the earlier idiocies of Wordsworth. Last of all, wc were not taught by expertly-trained teachers who believe in free discipline and try to understand our sensitive and complicated natures; we were instructed and disciplined by men and women who were remote, unapproachable, infallible. If we behaved badly we were punished, not diagnosed as glandular cases. Our teachers could not make a mistake, for they were not human beings but Olympians. That sort of thing is fortunately going out of date. No need for Lamb to write to-day as lie wrote of that teacher of his youth in the ‘ Essays of Elia.’ Our modern educationists arc on their guard against all that. They are not there to impress, but to understand; not to condemn, but to sympathise; not to chastise, hut to influence. It is all much moro sane and reasonable after all. The pedagogue, like the modern parent, has learnt the dangers of infallibility. Criticism and scepticism are in the very air we breathe to-day. No eyes are more dangerously sharp, moro cruelly unillusioned than a child’s. Once the faith is shaken, it is hard to restore it. Far better to found the relationship in the beginning upon reason, respect, and common sense than to build a false and tottering structure upon an ideal, but impossible perfection. I lately read this extract from the speech of an English head mistress. “If a pupil is consistently unsatisfactory, it becomes the duty of a head mistress to ascertain the cause. For this reason she must know the reaction of the child to each individual teacher that she may find the jarring note in the harmony of school life.” In other words, the teacher might be partly to blame if the child is tiresome or backward. What heresy is this? I seem to see all the shades of all the pedagogues of my youth rise up and call that head mistress not blessed. But this was an advanced educationist. Whether she had gone too far in her cult of individualism is not for me to say, for I am emphatically not an educationist. To my mind there seemed much common sense in the idea, for at least it reduced the teacher to tlie level of an ordinary human being, and allowed the possibility of human fallacy and weakness. But what interested me was to find the two t extremes in the same profession. For there are still the diehards, as I discovered when listening to a New Zealand head mistress talking “ shop ” the other day. “ The impertinent little monkeys, to imagine they can criticise their teachers,” she said of girls of fourteen and fifteen. I sat up at the statement and opened my mouth ; for an ecstatic moment I thought the lady had made a grammatical error and used “ can” for “ may.” But no. She really meant that a child of that age has not the capacity to utter a word of criticism against the divinely-gifted teacher. She was, you see, an Olympian. 1 wondered what she would have said of the other head mistress. Their codes were so entirely different, their points of view so divergent, that it seemed ridiculous that both are heads of large schools. Although the Englishwoman's ideal seemed to me rather s high and decidedly difficult of attainment, in a school where the classes are large, nevertheless she seemed to me much nearer the truth than the lady who 1 still fondly imagined that she dwelt upon Olympus. For, after all, by what right does a school teacher rank among the gods? A mere parent has long ceased to do so. The post-war child has hurled him from his uncomfortable eminence, and, having now picked himself up and anointed his bruises, he has discovered that mere mortals have much the best of it. He lias resigned the post of supreme mentor and become the good comrade. It is a more comlortablo role and fits the average parent much better. Why cannot all teachers follow tins example? Certainly the more modern product has already done so, but I have been seriously told by highlytrained and efficient teachers that the Olympian attitude is a necessity. 1 don’t believe it for a moment. It is much more like the insecure pose of Humpty Dumpty and likely to end in a similar catastrophe. For, if you claim Olympian eminence, von must possess Olympian qualities, and few of us arc as the gods. That remote calm, that superb detachment, that selfless devotion are sometimes to he found in mortals and occasionally in teachers. There have been even in this small country one or two groat head mistresses in this last decade who were able to sustain the god-like attitude because they had superhuman attributes. Their influence was incalculable, for the children they taught were quick to recognise the genuineness of their claim. Their very unconsciousness of their own aura mtido their influence more profound ami invaluable. But they were of the elect, and in any profession such loaders are rare.

The mistake is to put forward a false assumption, intended to impress smaller minds. Why should a teacher, simpiv because ho is teacher, become something between a patient _ saint and an avenging archangel? It is very fortunate that' this sort of thing is going out of date. Whether children were ever imposed upon by it is doubtful enough ; certainly the modern child will have none of it. Let us he glad for their sakes that „such false values are being rapidly discarded. It is the human touch in the modern teacher that appeals the most to the ordinary human child.