ART OF LIVING

Gisborne Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22289, 26 March 1947, Page 3

ART OF LIVING

EDUCATION’S AIM OVERCOMING TIME LAG “Is anything more deeply rooted in tradition than education?' In the year 1800 many public schools in England were still using Lilly’s Latin grammar because 250 years previously the masterful Henry VIII had insisted upon their adopting it,” said the president of the New Zealand Educational Institute. Mr. W. J. Cartwright, at a meeting of a South Island branch “Tradition still causes Latin to be a good deal taught in secondary schools, although it is useful only to those who get to the top whereas, as T. H. Huxley caustically remarked, only one out of 20 ever gets to the top. By partity of reasoning those lively minded people, the Greeks, ought to have been teaching Egyptian and neglecting Greek, instead of achieving immortal master- j pieces in their mother tongue. ; “As regards our own primary schools i the tradition of the Old Country was ( taken over holus bolus and only very slowly has it been modified. These schools are still obsessed with subject instruction; their main business is getting John to know instead of getting to know John and they still accept preposterously large classes for the sole reason that this is ‘as it was in the beginning.’ Realism is Getting a Hearing “Fortunately a growing trend toward realism is to-day challenging what is pedantic in the tradition of education. The pupil is on side with it; his natural instinct it to attach even greater importance to the What for than to the Why. “Education is becoming like plumbing and medicine, a scientific art. Alike as regards its technique and its aims it seeks to aid the pupil in the master art of living. When it completely succeeds the school will become as real as life. It is still far from having achieved that ideal. “Learning is too much one thing and life too much another, and with unconscious realism the school's inmates sense the difference and tend to put far more vigour and purpose into extra mural activities than they do into those of the classroom. In this respect the modern school has much to learn from modern business which, whatever its faults, does get ahead with a job that needs to be done.”