CULTIVATING CIVIC SPIRIT

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXVI, 21 April 1934, Page 9

CULTIVATING CIVIC SPIRIT

It was probably true, said Mr W. 0. Lester Smith, director of education for Manchester, in a lecture, that there were two main schools of thought about the teaching of citizenship, one advocating the direct teaching of civics and the other preferring that pupils should acquire a sense of citizenship indirectly. In England the tradition was emphatically in favour of the indirect approach. Pupils absorbed their civic background and their international outlook naturally through the medium of geography and history teaching, while from the playing-fields, school games, and school journeys, they acquired a breadth of view and understanding which made for good citizenship. “That heterogeneous thing an Englishman,” as? Defoe once said, was altogether too individual to be produced at his best by direct teaching: and the traditional way of producing him had been by providing him with a widely-planned education, in which games, the discipline of hard study, and many other elements played their part. It was most important to keep out of the schools anything which savoured of uniformity or of propaganda. “We are a people of individuals',” Mr Baldwin had once said, “and a people of character; let us see to it that wo never allow our individuality as Englishmen to be steamrollered.” Probably the greatest chango in education during the last 100 years had been in the relationship betwen the teacher and the pupil. The teacher was now the pupil’s close friend, and the boy or the girl who in school came under the guidance of teachers rich in personality and in knowledge had a great chance of developing into a citizen of the finest type.