BUILDING THE WALL.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21224, 2 July 1932, Page 1 (Supplement)

BUILDING THE WALL.

IN TROUBLOUS TIMES.

BY KOTARE

Kipling discovered during the war that all the essential elements of the world's dire situation had already been visualised more than two centuries before by John Bunyan, and that he had in his " Holy War " pointed out the one way through the morass in which the world found itself suddenly engulfed. Bunyan knew something, too. of depressions, both individual and national. He sees men and nations suddenly plunged into the Slough of Despond. Christian and Pliable "did both fall suddenly into the bog." Pliable feels that he has been betrayed. He decides that ideals are well enough, but will have nothing more to do with them if this is where they lead. " May I get out again with my life, you shall possess the brave country alone for me," he declares. " And with that he gave a desperate struggle or two and got out of the mire on that side of the slough which was next to his own house ; so away he went, and Christian saw him 110 more. Wherefore Christian was left to tumble in the Slough of Despond alone; hut si ill lie endeavoured to struggle to that side of the slough which was furthest from his own houso and next to the wicket gate." Pliable was concerned only to get out of the bog; Christian was determined to make the bog help him so far on his journey. It was not only necessary to drag himself out of its clutches; he had to make certain that he came out on the right side, with his ideals still intact, and with the knowledge his experience had won as an additional inspiration for the long road ahead. The Slough of Despond. The world is in the Slough of Despond as perhaps it has never been before. The men in charge of our destinies have one. tremendous problem that haunts them night and day. They have to get us out of the bog. And they deserve a lot more sympathetic co-operation than they usually get from those whom they are trying to serve. But we may get out of the slough on the wrong side. We may abandon all our ideals in the process. We may come through with only bewilderment and resentment and disillusion, back where we were before, with all our idealism shed in the struggle to escape. While weary eyes strain for the first glimpses of the dawn and eager watchers on the tower tell us that at last the eastern sky is troubled with morning, the surest promise of better days ahead lies in the spirit that calmly in the darkness makes preparation for the fullest use of the day that is bound to break before long. It is possible to build again the wall even in the troublous times. Nowhere else can this vision of the possibilities of a future better than the past that led us into the bog reveal itself with more promise than in the educational life of the community. Education has had a long struggle against ignorance and faulty ideals and wrong methods. It has been striving and with some measure of success to set the child in the midst. With everything else in these difficult times it has had to bear its share of the limitation that inevitably follows shortage of money. But the schools arc the chief ground of our hopes for a better future. They are building as their contribution to the State men and women. That work does not cease because money is in short supply. Rather there is the greater need of intensity of labour and clarifying of ideals just because the times are bad and the future uncertain. The "one asset that will fit us to face the vast, bewildering problems of a new world is a manhood and womanhood strong in character and lofty in idealism and purpose. And one of the surest signs that our educationists will not fail us is their resolute facing of the ultimate problems of education ir. the light of the present world situation and the desperate tasks of the future. If is not enough to fit boys and girls for their jobs. They themselves are the nation's richest treasure. It is what they are in the qualities of manhood and womanhood, their standard of values, their approach to life, that will count in the making of a new and better world. Education. And everywhere throughout the world educationists arc facing this their fundamental task. There is more seminal thinking in the world of education to day than there has been in any other stage of the world's history. Never was standardisation loss popular in the circles that give direction and tone to our educational systems. Never were easy short cuts to spectacular results in less favour. Never were the rights of the child more fully acknowledged and given their focal place in educational aim and method. Here is Mme. Montessori pleading for the child on the ground that many of the. vices of childhood are parts of the natural defence of young life against the rigidities of adult control. It cannot thrive in an environment where conformity to adult regulation is the chief ground of approval. Growth must be according to its own laws. Compulsion and repression produce distortion and disease. And to protect itself from adult control the child develops timidity, or laziness, or untruthfulness, or aimless restlessness. The spirit of adventure is replaced by the query, " Is this what my parent or teacher would like?" The child may learn to lie simply to escape from the consequences of adult tyranny. And it cannot settle down, because it is not permitted to settle down to the things that really interest it. Signs of Progress.

Here in Belgium the Dccroly method insists on learning through living. " Let the child prepare for life by living. Organise the environment to afford adequate stimuli for the tendencies favourable to development." On those broad principles the Decroly teachers organise a complete school curriculum, if tho word can be used where only the ends remain constant and the methods and means of attaining them are incessantly changing as tho interest of the children determines. Yet the Decroly children easily hold their own with tho scholars of other schools in. the State examinations. In America there is the familiar Dalton plan, which divides the work into monthly jobs, rather than into a mass of daily or hourly tasks, which leaves tho child to budget his own time with a view to a goal some distance ahead, and which gives him the freedom of movement among the resources of the school that he presumably has at home.

In England the P.N.E.0., building 011 the fact that a child has mastered a. language and a complex vocal mechanism, the chief problems of locomotion and equilibrium, by the time it is three, condude's that any attempt lo plav down to the child is a folly and an irreverence. The child is a mass of concentrated energy that wants work and stiff work. Why should a being that, has achieved such marvels by its industry before it is out of its babyhood be compelled to slow down and subject its fine spirit to mere puerilities? And there are many more. This universal quest of an education more worthy of the child seems more than most things we can see in this bewildered and bewildering world to hold the promise of a better day. While this spirit prevails whatever we lose, in the Slough of Despond we shall not lose our ideals, and we shall come out 011 the side nearest tho Celestial City.