MIXED MUSINGS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LV, Issue 16925, 10 August 1918, Page 1 (Supplement)

MIXED MUSINGS.

WAYS OF PLEASANTNESS. BY J. GILES. The suiting of studies to the genius Ii of singular use) whioh masters should duly attend to, that th» parent may thenoe consider what kind of life tho child is fittest Bacon, It Is a thing to he thankful for that the wisdom dropped on the educational highway by the great Chancellor in the early days of the seventeenth century is being picked up and assimilated by teachers in the corresponding days of the twentieth. For the clamour now resounding on every side against the mischievous ineptitude of large classes in schools implies a growing recognition of the obvious truth that " the suiting of the studies to the genius" is impossible when a single teacher is expected to cause every pupil of a class of sixty or seventy not only to swallow, but to digest, within a given time, all the items of an irreducible programme. The swallowing must surely be hard enough, but the digestion will be confined to a limited percentage of the class. I am not qualified by acquaintance with modern educational methods, or* with the practical working of the new ideas that are now striving to got themselves embodied in so many different ways and places, to say anything that can be very helpful, but. with a lively tense and memory, of some! of the iniquities of older, systems, I find it difPcult to stand by and abstain from contributing my little due of cheers and plaudits to the flag of educational reform which is carried with so much earnestness

and gallantry to-day by the men and wo-

men who are in the van of the movement. Thus stimulated by the atrocities of old methods which disgust my memory, and by the charms of the view which fascinate my imagination, I can only lament that I shall not be here to help in the cultivation and growth which will occupy the imme. diate future. But a note of warning may not bo out of place. The sanguine ternperament is very necessary for great undertakings, yet it may cause fallacious expectation of quick results, and is it not also possible that the desire of making every avenue to knowledge flowery and pleasant to the pupil may lead us to forget that nature will scarcely be persuaded to remove all hard obstacles from the path of her children,- and that the stern self-deter-mination ' and resolute will must be trained and strengthened as much as the sweet and gracious character nourished by tho loving sympathy between teacher and pupil. A Touch of the Original Sin. ;r Wo _ may grant that some 'little taint of sin," some slight flaws of way;wardnes3 and wilfulness still linger in tho child-mind, and may, in some cases, give trouble, but we are fast getting rid of the notion that these blemishes must be cudgellad out of the system by brute force. Yet that notion was very inveterate and seemingly ineradicable, even when chal-

lenged and donounced by tho wiser' minds as a barbarous fallacy. If we go back nearly six hundrod years before Bacon uttered his maxim about suiting. the studies to the genius, we find the illustrious Anslem, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury in the reign of the Red King, thus rebuking a teacher in the Abbey of Bee: "Force your scholars to improve! Did you evor.aee a craftsman fashion a fair imago out of a golden plate' by blows alone? Doe's he not now gently press it and strike it with .his tools; now with wise art yet more gently raise and shape it? What do your scholars turn into under this coaeeless beating?" And when the teacher confessed that " they turn only brutal," there came the retort: "You have bad luck in a training that only turns men into beasts I" And if, instead of going back to the eleventh century, we advance- into the nineteenth, I easily recall to my mind a schoolroom presided over by a reverend gentleman who was accustomed to "get out of bed on the wrong side" occasionally, and thou followed ono of tho "ugly days" for the school. I can still see him ffter some. seventy-five years'interval, moving about the schoolroom, brandishing and freely Ming tho cane to punish the idleness, dulness, or even the confused terror caused by his own ''{rightfulness," and with an angry grin on his countenance fitter for an Ogre or cannibal than for a high priest, in the temple of wisdom.

Tho Magic of the Cane. I think the "original sin" that lurks in human nature may perhaps be defined as,a tendency to movo in the direction of least resistance, and since this was by no means the direction • desired by the teachers, they adopted theVplan of mak,ing every other path still more difficult and of greater resistance than the paths of learning, an end attainable only by the constant use of the stick, and it seems never to have occurred to them that what Was wanted might be gained mote easily and expeditiously by making the; path of learning a little pleasanter to travel. Not that the stick was always a failure, at least in its immediate effects; had this (been so it could never have held its ground 80 long. I know a boy who. balked' bo determinedly at the multiplication, tablo that his class teacher took him up to the headmaster as a case beyond her resourcesof treatment. The fact was that the multiplication. table was to this youth the path of greatest resistance that he had ever been invited to tread, a path of seemingly impassable briars and thorns. But the headmaster, by the magio power of tho cane soon made, every other path a path of greater; and the multiplication table the path of least resistance, and so the trouble was surmounted. But this boy, idle as he was, afterwards when a quiet conversational explanation was given him of the meaning of a point, a line, a surface, an angle, eta, as defined by Euclid, was quite interested in the subject, and particularly in the notion of the Infinite divisibility of. space. I do not doubt that tho multiplication table might also have been introduced into his system by methods of " peaceful penetration" if the exigencies of the sohool system of that period—between thirty and ■forty years ago, had admitted of such methods. These were forbidden then as now, chiefly by the large classes preventing that sympathetic study of the character of each pupil without which the best and most zealous teacher can never make satisfactory progress.

I suspect that many of us, while clearly .seeing the mischief of large classes, have hardly realised in imagination the magically beneficient effects that may be expected when a real communion of heart and mind between teacher and pupil comes to be universal in our schools.' But to achieve this end the country must be prepared to spend far larger sums on education than we have yet dreamt of. We must have many more teachers, and they must be relieved by more liberal payment from the sordid cares that divert their minds from the noble work of their calling. . Then; if these principles be adopted. I seem to foresee a time when the united force of teachers, and taught shall prove to a dull world that wisdom, the completion and the crown of know, ledge,' is "musical as is': Apollo's lute," < and that her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are jeaco* - .''