SOME SCHOOLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20229, 13 April 1929, Page 1 (Supplement)

SOME SCHOOLS.

ENGLISH AND NEW ZEALAND.

BT N. T. SINCLAIR.

No. 1. A hundred years ago a new and unknown headmaster was appointed to Rugby School. It was a strangely daring appointment in that so far he had taught in no school. Yet, that it was fully justified is proved by the fact that it did fulfil the prophecy made by one who knew him that " if appointed ha would change tho face of education in tho English public schools." At the present date then, a hundred years after Dr. Arnold's assumption of power at Rugby, it is instructive to inquire what were those revolutionary principles of his—largely commonplaces of education now—and to what extent they are applied in New Zealand. Put briefly, his convictions were these: That education was much more than mere absorption of learning; rather that its aim should be to shape men of religious and moral principle, gentlemen in conduct and intellectually cultured; and yet men in tho manly sense of the word in that they had learned to bear responsibility and face problems, to respond to trust and endure the traditionally Spartan regime which had obtained at Rugby for centuries. That became, in time, the vaunted aim of all the public schools. In most now, except perhaps here in Rugby where Arnold's presence lingers still, it has so definitely become a commonplace that it is in danger of being forgotten, while the system which grew up from it still prevails. Confronted with the average boy, only a man himself of the highest moral character, only a man whose religion was as life itself to him, only an idealist, and yet an idealist with a stern hold on reality, could ever put into practice such an aim. He had to have faith that his boys would respond to tho almost unlimited trust he had in them; and yet a certain ruthlessness in lopping off every unworthy member. There, of course, lay the danger; that individuals would abuse the confidence reposed in them. His safeguard was that in an atmosphere such as he soon created any uncongenial character soon became obvious, and inevitably, irrespective of intellect, or influence or wealth, he had to go. And so, in time, the Sixth Form, in whom alone tho supremo power was placed, under the immediate influence of such a man, themselves exercised an influence which only the most callous could resist. The Power of Mass Conscience. There is an extraordinary power in mass conscience. I have been, perhaps, most aware of it on returning to England after a protracted Continental stay; a feeling that England, with all its faults, its lack of the externals of righteousness, its seeming religious indifference, so often beu ailed by contemporary moralists—that England is at heart moral, and righteous, and deeply religious. It is a feeling that I have been unable to escape even when forced to bo in the midst of much that is sordid and tawdry, and that same feeling I have had again in some of our great schools, when a great and good man has, by his presence and personality, even more than by his words, directed a whole community, not necessarily to be formally and outwardly religious, but to be really attracted to and to think normal a life of honesty and righteousness. I know quite well tho lurking thought in objection to this: That such boys will be prigs, and out of touch with reality. I do not think this is necessarily so. Decency and love of fairness are innate in almost every boy, and decency in thought and act is by no means incompatible with boyhood. But let. us admit that they may be prigs. These same prigs have turned out to be some of the finest Christian gentlemen in tho Empire, and if the men who rule England to-day, men who are responsible largely for the hope of a spirit in Europe akin to of the smaller community of tho school, if such men are trusted and admired for their integrity, as politicians are not in any other country in the world, it is largely because they have been influenced, often unconsciously, by such an atmosphere as this. Excessive Supervision. Assuming then that such a system does produce boys with a tendency to priggishness, let us look at the other possibility, a school without such an ideal. I do not think anyone other than a schoolmaster can realise tli.e great, the verygreat danger to tha weaker members in communities of boys. Our own memories of our schooldays are so very short. It has been my fortune to have some slight acquaintance with a French school; and there, to my considerable surprise, I found that only at very rare moments of the day or night were the unfortunate scholars free from the immediate supervision of a master who watched their every action, fed with them at all their meals (but did not plav with them) slept in their dormitory and generally produced the impression that he trusted them no further than his eyes could follow them, if so far; and was himself a gentleman of those high, intellectual attainments one so often finds in France, coupled (perhaps owing to the almost entire secularisation of education there) with a seeming indifference to everything moral or spiritual. The result was inevitable—a feeling that " since you don't trust us, we'll give you reason not to." Trust Must be Mutual. But, someone will protest, that is merely an argument against lack of trust. Trust, though, is a strange thing. It must bo mutual. And it is given much more readily when it is known to be expected; and expected by those themselves worthy of trust; that is men themselves possessed of the highest ideals, not only in the little matters of school life, but in their lives in general. Trust reposed by such men almost unfailingly evokes as response a general sense of condemnation of Hastiness and wrong, a sort of community conscience. It was the healthy consciousness that such an attitude was expected that was lacking in that French school, as it will be lacking in every school that is not living for an ideal. There are two types of school to-day that one meets the world over. There is the school that founds its fame on scholarship—or scholarships; that worships results, visible results in published lists of successes, and that measures its success entirely by tho length of these. We all know such schools. Admittedly, it is hard not to judge by such results. But, insofar as that is the only aim of such a school, or of even a portion of it, that schools fails in its main object, the production of cultured gentlemen. It is the cultural side, the hunianer side, that is so often lost sight of in the effort to achieve examination success; for culture is so much a wider thing than learning.