THE BOY AND THE MAN.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18297, 13 January 1923, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE BOY AND THE MAN.

THE GOAL OF EDUCATION. BY IEOTARU* ; The thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts; and they go deep. Not in the philosophical sense, of course. The priggish child, who asked its; astonished mother if she were never overwhelmed with the sense,of her own identity was a monstrosity, a freak, and a hateful one at that. Probably, that child was gazed upon with reverential awe by admiring relations, ; one could wish a common-sense father had appeared on the scene with the paternal slipper; or whatever domestic instrument of discipline maintained peace and order beneath his roof- But the simple vivid thoughts of childhood cut so deep that time only deepens the impression. As years mount up most men find that the long crowded years between have only for a time over-laid the deep-cut impressions of childhood. The palimpsest has been written over, again and yet again; but the original writing comes tlirough in the end. An old Highlander whose earliest years were spent among a Gaelic-speaking people, will sometimes lose the English that has been his only speech for half a century and more, and find the long-lost Gaelic of boyhood tripping easily off his > tongue. Many of our judgments, convictions that are out lifeblood, were fully formed before we were in our teens. "We think of men that were boys when we were boys. How massive, how gigantic, they loon*, through the mists of the years. There were giants in those days. In the light of those boyhod impressions wo judge the young i folks of to-day. They seem to have failed sadly in physique; they are nothing like the boys we used to know. They don't produce boys like the heroes of our school-days. Ana we shake our heads sadly and speak of the deterioration of the race. It is all nonsense, of course. Physically the race is progressing. The present generation of boys are probably the best the race has ever produced. Our mis-judgment is wholly due to the tyranny of our boyhood thoughts, The big boys of the 'school were huge as Hercules and wise as Solomon and efficient- as Alexander when we wore little chaps whose highest honour was the privilege of carrying our hero's bag to the football ground. We have never lost that impression of magnificence, of size, of power. A wise headmaster used to tell how every old boy visiting his school would remark sooner or later that the boys were smaller than they were in his time. "Not a bit of it," he would say, " the physique is better this year than it has ever been." "^

The Boy Hakes the Man. Charles Reade pictures for us an oldest inhabitant in a little English village. The patriarch spends his days drowsing in tho sunshine and bitterly complaining that the sun isn't as warm as it used to be when he was a boy, that is one of the most pathetic touches in modern literature. The old blood runs thin; but man will never admit the change in himself; it is the sun that has declined. There is no hand that grips so tight or shackles us so unrelentingly as that of our childhood impressions. Custom or culture may change ana modify; but many of the convictioins for which men would die are not the result, of mature logio» They were formed to all intents and purposes, complete, by the time we approaced adolescence. Man can pick up opinions anywhere. He can change them with his coat His mind may be the echo of the last book read—they very often are no more than that. But the most forma- j tive, th? most permanent things about him were his before he was ten. The standards by which he judges men and Movements and ideas may in their final shape be the elaboration of the mature mind; but the impulses that formed then? were implanted in his personality away back in the un-self-conscious yearß, in the shelter of home, in the rough and tumble of the pkyigroutid, in the classlooms of the primary schools.

: English Schools. * The English public schools been bitterly criticised. H. Q. Wells; andothera have found them an easy target. They lacked Prussian efficiency. They seemed to be getting nowhere. If you inquired) what were their aims, they had great difficulty in formulating a satisfactory reply. The * great stream of modern life was swiftly flowing in a new direction and they were calmly paddling in the old way in a quiet retired backwater. They were hopelessly out of touch with present day conditions. The world had swung through revolutions that had transformed the whole aspect of living, and the great nurseries of young English life were content to go the old way. The ostrich was a farseeing bird in comparison. Wells made out a good case. Aleo Waugh, , whose study of school life written in hts 'teens, startled the world a few years ago, has returned to the assault in his latest book, "Public School Life." Ho "stills stands by the conclusions of his schooldays. He sees the English school marred by tho false standards that, glorifV athletician and ignore the cultivation of those qualities that make for sound and sane exercise of the privileges and duties of citizenship. The boy leaves school with a mass of uncorrelated information, and the idea that prowess in the playing, fields is the chief end of man.

We must, admit that the persistent attack has revealed weaknesses in the English educational system that can be ignored only at England's peril. But after all the greatest danger for England will always lie in the hasty adoption of foreign models that do not,suit the genius of the English race. Our institutions are frankly illogical. The Frenchman, in spite of his superficial emotionalism, is the nearest approach in the modern world to the pure intellectual. He moves to his conclusions with a directness and inevitableneos that find no counterpart in the functioning of the English mind. He is logic incarnate, and possesses as the result of twelve centuries of linguistic consolidation and winnowing, the only language of the modern world supicremly adapted to logical expression. To, the Frenchman the English institutions are a constant source of astonishment, bewilderment even and contempt. But this at least we can say, they have grown cut of the English character. They are not the result of the English intellect coldly functioning in presence of a given problem, and relentlessly moving to the one logical solution. They are tho outcome of all we have been and are. We have reached them by tho only sure road, the way of experience. Others may call it muddling through; but our institutions work, and they express, the national character. Efficiency after all is largely relative; and we are the best judges of what suits us. The English race is essentially conservative because it, least of all the nations of the earth, is governed by abstract ideas. Many critics of recent years have belauded the efficiency of the Prussian. He has systematised everythingj he has eliminated spontaneity; he has seen _ a goal, visualised it with appalling precision, and then directed and controlled everything to its realisation. He has regarded men and women as mere factors in achieving his preconceived- idea of efficiency; raw. material to be moulded into the required shape. A soulless abomination that all but ruined civilisation After all, whatever the defects that common sense must remove, and education that plants in the rising generations impulses or honour, of loyalty, of service, of playing the game, will achieve infinitely moro in the things that matt, • than the most perfectly designed mechanical system Continental conditions and point of view can produce. Wo have much to change, much to remedy; but the test of any education system is not what it teaches a child to know, but what it teaches a child to be.