ARTISANS AND BOOK-LEARNING.

New Zealand Times, Volume XLX, Issue 8164, 16 August 1887, Page 6

ARTISANS AND BOOK-LEARNING.

TO THE EDITOR 01' THE NEW ZEALAND TIMES. Sir, —You quote with emphatic approval the following utterance of Mr Hawkins, a Masterton candidate for Parliament: —"A great deal of the present system of instruction is based on the assumption that all handicraft labor is undesirable, and that the object of education is to enable the young to escape from it.” Will you allowme to parody the remark, and say: “A great deal of theopposG tion to the present system of education is based on the assumption that learning of any sort is useless, if not injurious, to those who will live by handicraft labor, and that it should not bo an object of thou education to give them a knowledge of, or interest in, anything outside theip daily work.” Of course teaching so limited is not education at all; but it is not I who have given it the title. The opposition to the present system, in effect, goes farther than this, for it would narrow the capabilities of the future laborer or artisan in hia own work. The Education Boards are generally striving to widen those capabilities by introducing drawing, elementary physics, and the rudiments of chemistry and botany into the school course. To all this, by limiting education to the fourth standard, you, and those who think with you, would peremptorily put a stop. One day you give authorities to show that the Germans and the French are getting before ua in

the world and in its markets as a result of their more thorough school education; and another day you quote with gusto a sneer at the workman who was proud that his children were learning “ freehand drawing,” as something comically absurd. Mr Fraser, in his speech last night, said: “ Depend upon it, one of the very beat tools ever put into the hands of a boy was a lead-pencil,” I think Nasmyth, of steam-hammer celebrity, has said the same thing ; at all events, it is a natural remark for an engineer to make.. But something ia to be said by way of protest against your assumption that general knowledge is useless to artisans ; that “book-learning” and a taste for reading are as ridiculous in a working man as the notion of setting up for a fine gentleman was ridiculous in Moliere’a Monsieur Jourdain. Monsieur Jourdain’a mistake was in beginning his education too late in life, not in thinking that to the accomplishments he panted for were to be attained by study, even by ashopkeeper. Surely a State such as ours, which promotes higher education for the wealthier classes, is not going out of its province in putting within the means of the children of the poor the lifelong pleasures that are opened to them by “mere book-learn-ing”—pleasures that are tasted by none but those the foundation of whose booklearning was laid in childhood. Under the democratic Constitution of Ne»v Zealand, even the safety of the Slate, it seems to me, requires that all classes should have the beat education the State can provide for them,—l am, &c., H, August 12, 188 T. [Everyone who has followed our remarks intelligently will see at ence that “H.” has utterly misrepresented their purport.—Ed.]