The Evening Star SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1934. EDUCATION THEORIES.

Evening Star, Issue 21724, 19 May 1934, Page 14

The Evening Star SATURDAY, MAY 19, 1934. EDUCATION THEORIES.

Oi’ theories of education there is no end. There lias been a plethora of discussion of them recently between the annual conference of the New Zealand Educational Institute and the annual meeting of its local branch. State school teachers are concerned—excessively, we think, so far as children’s interests are affected —as to whether it should begin at the age of five or age of six, or be begun elsewhere than in their own schools. Yet when it is a question of how aims and methods of teaching can best be improved in their own schools, the opinions are almost as numerous as voices of enthusiasts raised to expound them. And all this is a buzzing about very little if we can believe the most extreme pronouncements of Professor Shelley, himself an educationist, who considers that on the whole .the greatest educational influence in the past generation has been the drama, not the schools. That is a hard saying which those whose reverence for the drama lies on this side of idolatry will find it quite impossible to accept. It would be difficult to argue that the playwright in this age exerts a greater influence than did the novelist in that directly preceding it, when a great many of the works of Dickens, Charles Reade, and Charles Kingsley, to name no • others, were written to promote reforms in the social, industrial, criminal, educational, asylum, and other systems, and succeeded in . promoting them. It was never claimed that the novel, in that age, was a stronger shaping force than the schools, and the chief end of the drama at most times of its history has been merely to amuse. At the same time that they affect a smaller number both influences begin much later than the teacher’s, and “ just as the twig is bent the tree’s inclined.”

The great difficulty of knowing what should be included in school teaching is that education, if it: is worth anything, is a training for life, and life is so complex in these days. That would suggest that a first thing to be learned is outlooks that will restore some of the simplicity of it. Mr Forsyth, in his thoughtful presidential address to the Otago Teachers’ Institute, dwelt on the desirableness not only of general needs being catered for, but of the latent creative power in each child being so cultivated, according to his special bent, that he would be prepared for expert leadership. It is a big subject, and we shall content ourselves with giving a few thoughts, relevant to the times, from the presidential address of Mr H. Humphrey, of Bolton, to the British National Union of Teachers. In education for leisure, which, Mr Humphrey contended, was at least as imperative as education for work, the “trimmings,” he considered, .were more important than the. old “three Rs.” The joy of colour, form, music, and creative art could provide hobbies which would obviate the necessity of reliance on hectic enjoyment—probably mechanically produced. In view of the greater utilisation of machinery, no longer could an extension of full-time education be regarded as the withholding of labour urgently needed in the industrial world. “ Not least among the problems of school difficulties is the seemingly hopeless child. With the smaller class there has been opportunity to seek for and find at least one talent, the cultivation of which has given the pupils some selfassurance, with resultant confidence in other directions. From this self-assur-ance has developed a measure of selfrespect, based on the knowledge that in one .thing at least he was the, equal of his fellows, and the child who might have entered the outside world with a feeling of inferiority, which might easily have resolved into a grievance against society, has become a useful citizen.” ;