EDUCATION BY SYSTEM.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVII, Issue 20520, 22 March 1930, Page 8

EDUCATION BY SYSTEM.

BUREAUCRACY'S TRIUMPH.

FAITH IN REGULATIONS.

SUBSIDIARY CHILDREN. /

BY JAMES SUNSHINE.

" What, am I?" asks the me within. " A creature of pretensions thin." 'Tis thus the System doth reply—"Your me must trnnsmut to my I. And when my I becomes your me, A pattern product you will be." —lmitations of Doctor Donne, H In regulations lies salvation. This is the impregnable faith of the bureaucrat. The repiedy for regulations flouted or misinterpreted or evaded is more regulations. Centralisation and official control mean government by regulation in Russia under Tsar and Bolshevist, in India under the Viceroy. It meant it in Rome under the Caesars and it means it in New Zealand under the control of the Education Department. Many emergencies, one measure. Diverse contingencies bearing only a distinct family likeness, yet one rule to apply to all. This is the weakness of regulations. Another weakness is their delusive omniscience and omnipotence. By their aid one can frame a new heaven and a//new earth —and Gazette it. It is regulations that make the teacher as omnicompetent as he or she has become, The Complete Teacher. l r ou see a young miss aged 21-25 in marocain or georgette bustling into school with an attache case. You respond to her simple charm. Beware in time. She is no "flapper into vamp," but the most complexly cultivated product of our Bmazing civilisation. She holds her B.A. degree (advanced English and Latin) and can instruct in a dozen to twenty subjects and aptitudes. I, an ageing inefficient, cannot and I admit it. I lack alike her endowments and her training. When I am expected to distribute my limited abilities evenly over a dozen branches of instruction and to obtain the like general ( proficiency from pupils presumably devoid o.{ biases, aversions, preferences and all-round ability, I weaken. No doubt it is simple—about as simple as doing with a single pair of hands all the plumbing, bricklaying, glazing, paper-hanging, joining and painting required in a modern villa residence. G. B. Shaw was right in saying, "He who cannot teaches." He must though he cannot. ./A War on Incompetence. The System?—no doubt it waged and wages a righteous war on incompetence. No dodbt it has graphed out a national norm and goads itself and its servaats to strive upward toward it, but because it is a system, the more systematic .it becomes,/'the more inhuman it becomes also. It awakens sluggish conscience to apprehension—there is conviction of sin in the heart of a pedagogue who knows that his Standard H. have a low median in arithmetic—he whose crayoned teapots lack technique is visited nightly by a sense of his own unworthiness. Both are contrite. / Both react to these probings and , heart searchings—react in the direction of their * pupils. The galled pedagogic jade winces and the withers of his scholars are wrung in consequence. But/ a truce to these depressing reflections. I admire a system—nay, more, I stand in awe of it—but my human instincts doubt, the efficiency of large scale production in education. If, emulous of Henry Ford, it does evolve a new beauty model ,of a pupil, I will admit my error. But because 1 doubt, I would willingly shatter centralisation in education to bits and remould the fragments nearer to the heart's impulse of the pedagogue, and the felt aptitude of the individual "pupil. Education, I have come to think, is a retail business best transacted in little shops, by craftsmen doing what their hand is cunning in. For this reason we shall in a generation, perhaps, revert to private schools. After all, if education is (dread polysyllable) individual development/'its concern is that in its pupils which is most intensely private and peculiar to them, and since a bureaucracy is guided by record cards and index numbers, most abhorrent to a bureaucracy. Maybe, however, while there is yet time, a revived and reconstructed board control may rescue the rising generation from a department that is absorbing and assimilating schools, scholars and teachers into its colossal and soulless self. I ask Mr. Atmoro. Mass Prescriptions. Two other syllabi there have been since Mr. Hogben's—Mr. Caughley's and the "new" syllabus. Both concern selves primarily with "the subjects of instruction—in quite a secondary way with the pupil. They specify, that is to say, .what is to be taught and how it is to ba taught. The pupil to be taught is simply the receptacle of the instruction. As with Mrs. Squeers' charges in Dotheboys Hall, 1 on a Monday morning, the business of the pupil is to take what his betters know is good for him. It is useless to claim for hirh, as an individual, an individual prescription. True, he differs from his iellows internally as much as he differs ex- 1 ternally. His urges and aversions are his Own, but the salutary processes of instruction are too highly placed and powerful to 'stoop to the purely personal caprices that actuate the likes and dislikes of such as he. It is unthinkable in the educational world that the teaching is subsidiary to the taught. So unthinkable that sooner than court derision 1 do riot venture to hint such a thing. Twfi other syllabi? The preamble 'of the new one propounds increased freedom. Quite honestly, and earnestly, I do not doubt. What does it mean, this freedom 7 In essence it can be only one 1 thing—the freedom of the pupil to become himself, to absorb and assimilate into himself all that his intuitions show him appropriate to his development, to reject or extrude whatever is inappro-j priate to his deepest seated tendencies.! Goethe did this, did it to the despair of < his progenitor, his pastors and his mas-1 ters, and became—dire destiny—the author of Faust and Europe's greatest man of letters. Can any such freedom be ac- j corded to each pupil in a class of 50—accorded by a system that senses peril to itself in the challenge of adventures in education —accorded by pedagogues with the habit of mass inculcation strong upon them 1 > : I doubt it., I, an agnostic regarding svl- I labi, a poltroon, when confronted by the system;/ I turn easily on the procrustcan bed that has cramped and stretched m©, to the annually changing requirements of nearly 40 inspections and 20 proficiency tests. / And a second time 1 ask Mr. Armors. 1 The previous articles in this series, now concluded, were published on March 1, 8 .and 15.