The Evening Star SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 1938. OTAGO BOYS’ HIGH SCHOOL ANNIVERSARY.

Evening Star, Issue 23041, 20 August 1938, Page 16

The Evening Star SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 1938. OTAGO BOYS’ HIGH SCHOOL ANNIVERSARY.

Seventy-eivb years ago the Otago Boys’ High School had its beginning —fifteen years after the foundation of the province and six before that of the University. It did not lack its vicissitudes in the earlier times. First head masters had their own difficulties to contend against, which wore inevitable, perhaps, in such a youthful settlement, with all its development lying before it. The adverse period in the school’s history, however, was comparatively soon surmounted. The opening, in the first ’eighties, of the stately building that is still its home, must have been in itself an incentive to progress and new pride. There has been no looking back since then except in the affectionate memories of past scholars and masters; and rectors, whom it used to be a habit to criticise, have had their full meed of praise. It would be strange wore it otherwise, because the strength of a high school depends on the strength of the sentiment which it builds round it by dint of its influence and traditions, and the record and traditions of the Otago Boys’ High School have in this country been second to none. The value of such schools can fail easily to be sufficiently recognised by those who have not passed through them. It is plain that they are concerned with many more things, more subtle and more difficult to appraise, than the quickest possible passing of examinations, which seems the most direct way to business success. They are suspected of being almost exclusively interested in the “ humanities,” a suspicion that has not been true for thirty years; and, in spite of all the fields in which it has been demonstrated, the value of the “ humanities ” as a mental training and in the training of character can still leave materialists' doubting. It has been well said that not to train scholars but to turn out men is the best function of popular education, and by that test the high schools of New Zealand, that of Dunedin with as much confidence as any, can fairly claim to bo judged. The Otago Boys’ High School has produced men, a surprising host of them, who have been prominent in every activity of life not only in this Dominion but far beyond it, at the same time that it has not failed to produce scholars. It was a secondary school teacher who not long ago, at a minor gathering, choosing his words as he spoke, defined the typo of man such schools strive to turn out: “ Men who can be just and who can be tolerant; who know how to command and how to obey.” While such are the principles of British schools, new Miltons will have more reason to say, *’ Let England not forgot her precedence in teaching the world how to live.” Old boys, of all ages and stations, from all parts of the Dominion, arc mot now in Dunedin to celebrate the seventy-fifth birthday of their school. Such reunions have not been rare in its later years. The fiftieth, sixtieth, and seventieth anniversaries of its foundation have all been previously’ celebrated. Such repetition makes inevitable a first note of sadness, as faces of those who were prominent in past celebrations, who were honoured for their services to school and country or whoso virtues of character had won for them troops of friends, are missed from the latest, but all the decades of the Otago Boys’ High School’s history will be represented in the present ’commemorations. • There are no bonds of friendship like those that are formed at school. It is the joyousness of forthcoming gatherings that will be remembered by those who take part in them to their latest day. All outside the brotherhood will wish the greatest success to the celebrations, and, for the school, may it continuo to prosper and time only strengthen its traditions.