GOING BACK TO SCHOOL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXI, Issue 18629, 9 February 1924, Page 1 (Supplement)

GOING BACK TO SCHOOL.

IS IT WORTH WHILE? BY MATANOA. Back to school! After the relaxation of holidays, when the mind was free from leading strings", comes again the discipline of the classroom and the lesson-book. Young lives are being readjusted to fhe duty of learning. Feelings of joy and resentment jostle each other at the prospect, and some naive outbursts betray the mental medley. In a week or two the readjustment will be complete. The magic of the playground will have cast its spell anew and even that tenuous atmosphere called "the spirit of the school" have wrapped these young lives around again. For them, it will soon he well. But older folk are called at this season Co ruminate a little upon the whole thing, and to wonder whether all is as it should be. For them, the youngsters' going hack to school is a very serious business. Some momentous decisions have already had to be made. Should John continue at the secondary school? Should Bill go tliero or take up more technical study? What will be best for Mary—a little more French and science or some advanced tuition on the piano and the wringer at home? It is rather a worry; and then there in a persistent questioning as to whether tho scheme of training that the schools provide is all it is acclaimed to be, for this age has icst the oldtime habit of taking schools for granted. Even where they are not found and manned by the State they are become a national concern. Distrust of Methods. This concern has been intensified by the war. That shook our self-complac-ency. It stirred us to make ourselves better men and women. In our optimistic moments we are sure that can be done; but in less sanguine moodsalas! all too frequent —wo think it too hard a task. But still there is left to us the chance of making our children the better men and women we would have been. Even if we grey-headed old sinners are past redemption with our set ways of thinking and feeling and doing, youth may be bent without being broken. Plastic, it can be given new shape with some safety and certainty. But we have come to distrust profoundly the methods used in the process. That disquiet began to vex us before fhe war. "Long before the outbreak of the war," to quote Lord Desborough, one of the busiest and most practical men in England's public life, "doubts had arisen in the minds of many parents whether the very expensive education which they were giving their sons in public schools and universities was one which was really fitting them .for the position they were to take in after life, and whether they were doing their duty by them." It sounded like an echo of Sir John Gorst's declaration that of the millions spent by Great Britain on education a large proportion might as well be thrown into the sea for all the good that was being done. The criticism has been uttered by many voices. Not long ago a retired chief inspector of schools in England confessed that for thirtyyears he had been employed in carrying out a vicious system, from which little good could be expected. The Spirit of Pestalozzi But that was England, says someone more careful about the reputation of this country than for improving its character; wo here, with our long experience of a system of national education, do things better. Do we? That is doubtful. At all events, distance from the land that is peculiarly both the bow and target of these shafts of criticism should not maKe us indifferent to their flight. Haply they may find joints in our own armour. Our notions and methods arc so largely modelled on the ideas of the Homeland, and our handbooks and our general educational literature come thence so largely, that it would be extremely sanguine in us to hope that we had unfailingly imbibed excellences and refused errors. Indeed, judged by growing disquiet among our own pedagogues, the ideas that threaten to turn the educational world upside down are come hither also. Some specific criticisms emerge. We suspect that we have boen pinning our faith too much to boot-learning. The spirit of Pestalozzi walks abroad, and disturbs departmental offices and conferences of teachers. 'His scholars, as ttieir parents complained, were ignorant of many things, but Pestalozzi aimed to produce, not a memory machine, nut "a man in the highest sense of the word. One of his canons was "the development of human nature, the harmonious cultivation of its powers and talents and the promotion of manliness of life—this is the true aim of instruction.* Set against that shining mark, Sir John Gorst's comment is black indeed: "a stunted race, with all its power of initiative crushed and its best capabilities smothered under mere book-learning was his unblinking description of education's product. Matthew Arnolds latest report as a school inspector was not flattering to the system he had helped to administer: "Our existing popular school is far too little formative and humanising, and much of :t which administrators point to as valuable result is, in truth, mere machinery." Mechanical Views. We have allowed the syllabus to become crowded beyond a wise limit. It is loaded below the Plimsoll line. Wo have made children work-weary and surfeited their appetites instead of quickening them. A child's " capacity " has not suggested something to be trained, but something to be filled. Distaste for learning has been engendered in place of an eagerness to prolong the process. We have sadly set before our young folk s eyes the hope of finishing their education- • . We have had, moreover, a passion for standardising. As if children's minds were fitted with sets of interchangeable parts! That has tended to make educational method mechanical, resembling nothing so much as those masterly machines that take porkers in at one end and turn sausages out at the other. Perhaps Germany's tragic success in this way of doing things may serve as solemn warning. But there are near at hand some products of our own misdoing. The development of individuality dot.-., not imply absolutely divergent training of each unit in the nation : for there is a deep, fundamental basis of common experience on which the divergent tendencies rise. Professor Paulsen's summary of the facts points the wise educator's way. "The ideal of a true national education would not be an equal education for all, but rather a maximum of individual development corresponding to the infinite variety of tasks, of powers, and of gift* produced by the creative forces of nature, on the basis of a homogeneous education of the whole people, forming part in its turn of the universal education of mankind, conceived as an organic whole." Our record is not one of utter failure, by any means. We may take heart of grace. But success has been so far from complete that many of us, " children of a larger growth," would .be none the worse if we, too, could at this time go baH< to school, along with the children who go freighted with our loving hope for them.