THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1912. INFLUENCE OF CHARACTER.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIX, Issue 14925, 24 February 1912, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 24, 1912. INFLUENCE OF CHARACTER.

Thf. admirable address recently delivered by Lord Rosebery at Glasgow on the, subject of education is suggestive of many ideas ; not the least of them is the axiom which he then put forward that the influence of character in teachers, and, we might add, in their scholars, was of an almost paramount importance. It is true that in these days of universal and compulsory education much more is thought of a, superficial knowledge of many subjects than of the inculcation of character, which is by far the most important of the attributes of good citizenship. There are many men, learned in themselves, who are unable to impart to others the knowledge which they have; whilst there are many first-class teachers, in all countries, who, without very great knowledge, are able to achieve by the influence of their own personality something which great scholars have been unable to do with their pupils. The traditions of English school life arc very different from those which obtain in the colonies, not so much because the subjects are different as because of the value ascribed to personality. Aristotle, over two thousand years ago, being asked in what way the educated differed from the uneducated, replied, " As the living differ from the dead;" there is no possible doubt that education must be thus differentiated from pure learning, as many a man has found out to his cost. In modern times there would seem to be an unwise departure from the old rules which made English education great, in the new system of bringing the whole force of teaching to the acquisition of knowledge by a pupil, instead of first forming a character, and then letting that character absorb such knowledge as was suited to the particular brain. Books have been written on the " fagging" at Eton and other public schools, but the fact remains that the English public schoolboy, to-day, is quite able to hold his own when he is opposed at Oxford to the postgraduates of colonial universities, who, according to the best opinion in England, are lacking in the discipline of the preparatory school.

There is no doubt that it is between the age of eight and fourteen that the character of a child can be best moulded, and it is in the preparatory school that both England and Germany have achieved so great a success, not by the inculcation of learning, but by the fact that their teachers have been trained to specially devote themselves to the forming of the character of the child ; and, in modern days, there is no doubt that the educational movement is becoming more and more restricted to a syllabus and to lines less personal as regards the, discipline of the mind. A hundred years ago things were different. It has been recorded that Washington, before he became a public man, was a bad speller, but people were not so particular then as they are now, and, besides, there really was no settled system of spelling in their time! When the General wrote for a "rhcam of paper," a beaver •'hatt," a suit of " cloaths," ; and a pair of " sattin" shoes, there was no authoritative dictionary to keep the people's spelling within bounds; and it is probable that the complexities which modern conditions have given to the English language are not particularly, calculated to imfliraxji.

the chances of the younger genera- ; tion learning to speak and to write : correctly. It is quite true, as Lord Rosebery said, that there is a great difference between the excellence of a man's intellect and the excellence of his disposition, personality, and temperament; and an enormous amount of good might be achieved if educational authorities were to consider the question of character in their teachers much more than they, do, as at present, their learning. Possibly Lord Rosebery's belief in universal education may not be accepted by those who come in after years to write of the history of our times; for it is still asserted by many that the giving by compulsion of education to the masses has done as much good as it has harm. This depends, of course, upon the opinion held as to the ultimate outcome of what is termed progress. For it is agreed on all sides that education has been the primary cause of much of the industrial unrest of the past century ; because the dissatisfaction which has been evinced by the workers of the conditions under which they labour ha* been brought about principally by a more intimate knowledge of the economic conditions of society. Lycurgus, the law-giver of Sparta, resolved the whole business of legislation into the bringing up of youth, and this has always been given as a reason for one of his ordinances .which enacted the forbidding of written laws; he believed in making of his people good citizens, that they should be led less by rule than by conduct. It was because the Spartan people estimated character as the highest of all virtues that, for a time at least, they became the greatest people of their world. In this country, where there is no room for extreme poverty or hard conditions of life, it behoves all who have at heart the improvement of the conditions of life to see that the young should cease to be taught that the only thing in life is knowledge or money, and that they should revert more to the primeval conditions of the pioneers who made this country great, and who, without knowledge and without money, depended on their character alone as an asset to take them through the battle of life.