The N. Z. Times WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1910. REAL EDUCATION

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXII, Issue 7018, 5 January 1910, Page 4

The N. Z. Times

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 5, 1910. REAL EDUCATION

WITH: WHICH 18 INCORPORATED THE “WBLLINOXOH UCEtnttNDBNT.” ESTABLISHED 1645.

We ax© very glad to find that the Mayor of Wellington is not deterred by dread of tbe pedant or specialist from giving expression to ideas on education which by running counter to certain, dogmas of pedagogy aro apt to be regarded as hopelessly bourgeois. “ Try and give the children the kind of knowledge that will fit them for the battle of life,” he said yesterday, in addressing the Educational Institute. “What we want, is to train our people tor modern wants, ’ and to stop “ wasting time over Latin and Greek.” These we take to be the last words of wisdom on a subject usually clouded by a maze of theory and disputation concerning “methods.” The kind of training our children require to-day is the same as their fathers needed—-and did not receive. They require a systematic grounding in elementary subjects, and from the earliest, possible age a training, in the ■rudiments of science and technology. Successive generations of men and women have had to bear the consequences of the schools being dominated by arrogant “experts,” obsessed by the idea that “ education ” should he purely literary—that a lad should go from childhood to budding manhood absorbing a given quantity of machinemade instruction, the great hulk of which was absolutely useless to him in after life. In the primary and secondary schools the scholars were divided off into water-tight compartments in which the instruction was so carefully stereotyped that up to sixteen and seventeen years of age the education of those who were to become artisans was the same as those who were destined for law, for commerce, or agriculture.

Of late years the specialist has been made to see the folly of his past, and the education systems of most countries are emerging from rule-of-thumb to better things. Yet though this is the case education suffers by the dead weight of superfluity imposed upon every scholar in the schools. There is an insane desire to crowd subject upon subject—a seemingly ineradicable tendency to believe that the mental powers of youth are stimulated by tenminute lessons upon everything under the sun. The result is that an enormous percentage of our youth arrive at the school-leaving age unable to write decently, painfully slow in the use of figures, wretchedly poor readers, and still worse at spelling. They have been taken over a prodigious field of “ instruction,” it is true, but the snips and snaps of knowledge they reItaan at the end of their school days are a poor substitute for loss of a mastery of those few, simple subjects which axe the foundation of all knowledge. It is lamentably true that the education of nine men out of ten commenced not when they went first to school but when they left it. It is said, 6f course, that the business of the educationist is to train the faculties of observation and powers of reasoning, but while this is obviously true there is good ground for believing that the theory as put into practice is not infrequently destructive of its aim. We are either modern or oldfashioned enough to believe that a lad confined during his schooldays to a syllabus restricted to furnishing him with an all-round working knowledge of his mother tongue, facility in the use of figures, and a comprehension of physical geography, in addition to some skill with his hands, will develop into a much more competent citizen than will the product of a scientific-ally-arranged course of educational homeopathy. The inauguration of technical schools was originally a concession to a heterodoxy which rebelled against the conception that education, to be either effective or useful, must

bo literary. That was the first step in an evolution which is going to completely change the popular conception of what education really is—and in some countries has altered it entirely.

The training of youth should bo in direct conformity with the requirements of life—it should be utilitarian to the last degree. As for Latin, to which the Mayor referred, in appropriate terms, there are many parents, and still more schoolmasters, who should he put into straight waistcoats for encouraging lads to take up this wholly useless study to the exclusion of really helpful work. For a boy not destined for one of the professions to spend a year or two struggling with a Latin grammar is a wicked waste of energy and time. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men in New Zealand, ex-students of the secondary schools, who did this dreadful thing, to their own subsequent regret and the everlasting shame of the system which permitted it. Not even in defence of that much-abused term “general culture” can it bo pretended that year's should be spent in acquiring intimacy with the language of Caesar. The fatal priggishness which inflicts Latin upon more than 5 per cent, of our schoolboys has, indeed, much to answer for. The “magnificence of our education system ” is, naturally enough when everything is considered, a topic upon which the public speaker desiring an easy subject for ’discourse is accustomed to expand with magnificent emphasis, but for ourselves wo must confess to contemplating the whole business in a spirit of iconaclasm. Our primary schools have for years been a field for faddism, our secondary schools are notoriously in need of drastic reform, and our university is a “ degree mill” —and nothing else. On these institutions an enormous sum is annually expended, out of all proportion to the benefits they confer upon the population. Yet, so far as "the training of our girls to the responsibilities of womanhood is concerned and our youth to the business and activities of manhood, we have . not the slightest ground for justifiable ■ pride. The pointed comments of the Mayor were made at a timely moment, and we hope that neither I>r Newman or any other person holding similar opinions will allow themselves to be frowned into silence on this subject. Our chief citizen is most emphatically right in what he has to say on this subject, and while it is the custom of some pompous critics to sneer at “the practical man ” when he speaks about education—as if it were a preserve sacred to superior persons—wo are bound to say that to the ear’s of most people his words ring with, moro sincerity than a great deal of. the eloquence which comes from benevolent theorists.