EDUCATION SYSTEM

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXVII, Issue 8366, 28 February 1913, Page 10

EDUCATION SYSTEM

ADDRESS BY DR. HATHERLY SOME DEFECTS EMPHASISED. Dr. H. R. Hatheriey, of Wanganui, in his presidential address to the congress of the Hew Zealand branch oi the British Medical Association at Wanganui on Monday last, said : I fear that some education enthusiasts aro apt to overlook the fact that education is not limited to school life. True education begins in the cradle and ends in the grave. Any attempt to crowd into the few short years of school life a superficial acquaintance with a large number of subjects is good for neither mind nor body. Our forefathers valued depth more than surface; fewer subjects were taught, but tho few wore taught more thoroughly; they thought it bettor for a child to learn a few subjects web Mian to have a superficial acquaintance with many. Our Education Acts provide for free, secular, and compulsory education. School age is defined by the Act (section 142) as “any age between the years of five and thirteen, reckoned in each case from the last preceding birthday.” The age when education is compulsory is from seven to fourteen, or until a child has passed the sixth to the university. That it should he the right of every child in the Dominion; free from the infant school to the university. That it should be secular, as regards doctrinal religion appears to be unavoidable unless the various denominations can agree —a not very likely event. Those who desire religions instructions in our schools must provide their own schools, as tho Catholics do, or else confine religious instruction to their own homes, and Sunday schools. ELASTICITY WANTED. It is the compulsory clauses in our Education Acts which, in my judgment, are too drastic, too wanting in elasticity and adaptability to provide lor the endless variations in health and mental capacity; compulsion may often prove disastrous to the health of the growing child whose mind is being trained at the expense of his body. You may compel a child to attend school, a very different thing to compelling him to take advantage of his opportunities. Education must be absorbed willingly to be of any permanent value. Shakespeare’s schoolboy “with shining face and satchel trudging unwillingly to school” might as well have played truant for all the benefit he derived. As regards our infant schools I have little .but praise. It is, no doubt, a great blessing to mothers in these days, when domestic help is a luxury for the rich and an impossibility for the poor, to know that their young children are well cared for, happy and kept amused by trained teachers. The words of Socrates, written more than 2000 years ago, “Bring not up your children by compulsion and fear, but by playing and pleasure” are being realised in the twentieth century. A normal healthy and intelligent child is naturally inquisitive; and this, which may he interpreted as thirst for knowledge should be encouraged. Self education is in progress, and will often find an outlet in destructiveness and mischief. SELF-EDUCATION. Children, afi least infant children, should bo allowed to educate themselves to a very great extent. I agree with tho opinion expressed in a recent leading article in the London “Times” that “the first duty of a teacher is to discover a child’s natural aptitudes in the national interests as well as his own, and let him follow his natural bent.” . There is a profound philosophy in a sentence from Longfellow’s Miracle Play in the Golden Legend. The Jewish Rabbi is teaching the infant Jesus his alphabet. On being scolded for not giving the second letter he remonstrates with- the Rabbi: “Whirt Aleph means I fain would . know Before I any further go.” The moral is that in education the foundations must be sound, or there will be no lasting stability in the super-structure; hence it is better to learn, however little it may "°> thoroughly, so that it is really understood, than to have a little brain staffed with a varied assortment of undigested facts. HIDE-BOUND SYSTEM. Assuming that tho average child of average intelligence can pass through six standards between tbo ages of seven and fourteen, we have yet to reckon with the many children who are below the average in intellectual capacity and bodily health, and in whose case it would be better if education began and ended later in life. If our educational system is to be » hide-bound system of syllabi examinations, inspections, and standards, the principle of compulsion cementing the whole together, our primary schools will become virtually educational factories in which tho raw material aged seven is inserted at one end of the machine and the finished product, aged fourteen, is turned out at the other. And what about the finished product? No doubt our Now Zealand children are as clever and well-inform-ed as any children in the world for their age. They have been taught something about meridians, longitudes, equinoxes, solstices, the inclination of tho earth's axis to the plane of its orbit, and a host of other titbits of usefid information, and are prone to look upon their parents as' back numbers if their ideas are rather hazy on these subjects. PUT TO THE TEST. Looking through the syllabus of tho sixth standard, 1 am not ashamed to say that if I had to pass an examination in it, I should find it convenient to have a little time for preparation. Many prominent citizens, not excluding members of Parliament, might find, if put to the test, that they have forgotten a great deal of that which they were taught at school. Wo commence serious study after we leave school; it is thus we begin to specialise according to our prospective vocation in life, and most students do their best work in solitude. Mind educates mind through tho medium of books. A large portion of school life should be devoted to cultivating habits of observation and reasoning, and also to the formation of character. A child’s mind may bo crowded with facts, and yet his or her education may be a dismal failure. NO CULTURE. The child who leaves school, strong, healthy and virile, with high ideals of truth, honour, justice, and mercy, and with a genuine thirst for knowledge—not satisfied with that which has already been acquired, but, like Oliver Twist, asking for more, will be well prepared to enter the battle of life as

a sturdy soldier. In our school syllabus there seems to bo no reference to culture. Culture is to education what poetry is to prose. It may bo defined as the capacity of appreciating and enjoying all tnat is beautiful in nature, art, literature, and science. It is possible to be highly educated and vet devoid of culture, as it is to be uigbly cultured and indifferently educated If the sordid, mercenary idea that inoney-making is the only important business of lit© is held, then culture is useless. It is, however, a faculty worthy of cultivation to find true enjoyment in artistic and aesthetic pursuits, to prefer intellectual recreations to tho coarser forms of amusement —to have refined rather than vulgar tastes. WHERE IS HOME LIFE? Although our compulsory educational system produces clever children, it does not produce cultured ones. Go to our public library and you will find, that the best books are clean and in good condition, while those of no literary value whatever indicate by their soiieU, dogs-eared, dilapidated condition that they have had a wide circulation. Literary garbage is eagerly devoured, while the masterpieces of fiction are rarely inquired for. We hear from the pulpit, and we read in tho press lamentations about the lack of parental control and the decay or home life. there is, unhappily, too much evidence of both. Children are m evidence at football matches, picture shows, sports meetings, and in tho streets. We see them enjoying a degree of freedom which their parents never knew. Go down the Wanganui avenue on a Saturday night, and you will see scores of children parading the streets without any responsible person to look after them. The mother has, perhaps, taken the baby to the picture show, the father is- at his club, and the boys and girls roam the streets at their own sweet will, and where is tho home life? If Burns had been born m New Zealand he could never have written Ine Cotter’s Saturday Night”—it would have been hopelessly inappropriate. We grow sentimental over Fayn s ballad “Home, Sweet Home,” especially when it is sung by a famed pnma donna (and they all do it). Street, Sweet Street,” should be the modern version.