MOULDING YOUNG MINDS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23009, 9 April 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

MOULDING YOUNG MINDS

Schools and Masters ♦<*.

By KOTARE

THE death of a much-beloved headmaster who had spent all his manhood years in formative contact with boys and in seeking practical solutions for the age-old, ever-recurring, always-new problems of education must have directed all but the most flippant to a consideration of the place of the teacher and the 'school in the life of a community.

Where the religious motive is dominant the end of- all educational processes is always clearly defined and education is then chiefly concerned to find the best methods to further that end. Where the religious motive is ignored or denied, the modern humanist who sees in the development of the individual the only hope of a better world, concentrates on an attempt to " insure human well-being jn the future which shall surpass that 1 - of the present and the past.

It is the future that counrts. We must set about building the better men and women now. Human personality, if it gets its chance, is capable of almost unlimited expansion. It has not had its chance so far. The school becomes child-centred: the adult is responsible to the child, not the child to the adult.

One of the most interesting of personal educational books of recent months is Mr. Frank Fletcher's " After Many Days." Mr. Fletcher is a product of the much-criticised English Public School system, and he has had a prominent part an directing that system in its latest developments. As a master at Rugby and later as headmaster first of Marlborough and then, for twenty-four years, at Charterhouse, he has been in the mid-stream of all the twentieth century progress in educational theory and practice.

The Long View 1 remember being much impressed wi£h the retort c made by an English farmer to a New Zealander who was criticising adversely, and not very wisely, the English methods of working the land. It was hopelessly out-of-date, the critic said: they ought to see how farming problems were tackled in America and the colonies. The Englishman said that the farm land he was working had been worked for over a thousand years. It was as fruitful now as it had been at-the beginning. It had served the needs of countless generations and would serve the needs of countless more.

There could be nothing. wrong with the methods that had done all that was required of them and had not impoverished the soil., It would be time for the colonies to assert their superiority when a few more generations had passed. The long view might be the sanest in the end. I do not know how far that expresses the actual situation, but it is at least a point of view of value and cannot be dismissed as hide-bound conservatism. The same would hold of anything that expresses the essential English character. The English Public School has had many critics, and it is certainly open to attack. But it has played and is playing a notable part in English life. It has persisted by its merits. It has fitted admirably into the English scene that gave it birth. And one sees clearly why this has been so from Mr. Fletcher's autobiography. He has never been very strong on theory. He is concerned to t&ake an institution work. He checks a tendency here and there, turns misdirected forces into new channels, seeks to impart from his character and personality the life ideals that have proved themselves in his own experience. He finds an institution and a system, and informs them with his own sense of values and his own spiritual vision. Training Leaders That must he the function of every zealous teacher. He does not blame his tods for any failures in his workmanship. The garden is the gardener. It will give the results if the gardener is capable and keen. While he gives himself to the whole school, becomes the soul animating the whole body, the powerhouse of standards and ideals, he, as headmaster, concentrates on the outstanding boys who, by the winnowing of time, at last reach the sixth form.

There is something of H. G. Wells' samurai idea of education here. Wells sees the highest function : of education in the creation of a section of the community fitted to assume leadership. We need leaders more, than anything else in this perplexed world, and leaders can be made. Our trouble is that we have been content with multiplying mediocrity. But a million mediocrities cannot take the place of one leader. It is the leader we should have as the supreme goal of any reasonable education system that looks, as all must do, to the future. Mr. Fletcher would not subscribe wholly to the Wellsian doctrine but his own methods of concentration on the few selected by the natural -processes of school life look in the same direction. He also found himself heir to a bad tradition of the superiority of games. When he came to his schools he found that the athlete was the hero and the studious boy was tolerated with something of contempt. He himself was both scholar and athlete, and he set himself to establish the pre-eminence in the school of sound ideas of scholarship. School Stories He noted that the adulation of the athlete was bad for the school as a whole, that it created entirely false standards in the minds of the physically outstanding, and that it turned the clever boys not well endowed physically into embittered high-brows. Of all the products of the schools these last seemed to him the least desirable. And the modern world was getting cluttered up with them just when sanity and sincerity were the qualities the age was most needing. Mr. Fletcher does not say so, but it is clear from his book that his change of stress in school life had results that were satisfactory to him. He notes as a side issu,e that far too much money is spent on equipping boys for games. There is the same tendency here. *

Some of us remember the homemade running kit, the community bats, and the simplicity of our school football and running togs as we see the splendour of the equipment of many of the youngsters ,of to-day. Mr. Fletcher vigorously condemns the current type of school story. Ho protests against the vogue of books like Arnold Lunn's Harrovians," and he calls Alec Waugh's " Loom of Youth " a product of disgruntled adolescence. School life cannot be a satisfactory theme of a novel. It is too quiet and ordered and uneventful. It can be made interesting only by a misleading concentration or a heightening of colour " Stalkv and C 0.," he thinks a caricature, but a very brilliant one, and at its foundation are real men and rea masters. He excepts from his general condemnation "Tom Broun, two books I not come Bradby's " Lancaster Tradition, " Chronicles of Dawiiliop®.