TRAINING FOR LEISURE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 22198, 27 February 1934, Page 10

TRAINING FOR LEISURE

GREATEST PROBLEM OF :•;!,; V EDUCATION MORE TIME ON OUR HANDS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, January 2. At the annual conference of Educational Associations, Dr George Dyson, master of music at Winchester College, chose "Education for Life" as' the subject for his presidential address. Broadly speaking, he said, education as we had inherited it was devised for clerks, either clerks in Holy Orders or clerks in the learned professions,. Winchester College was one of the first and most famous of educational institutions of this order, and William of Wykeham, who founded it, had no vague schemes of general but purposeless acquisition of knowledge. His college was as strictly vocational as Lord Melchett's chemical laboratories or Henry Ford's workshops." He wanted clerks, clerks in Holy Orders, to serve the Church and administer the State. To that precise and practical end he built, his colleges at Winchester and Oxford, and every school and college in this country had imitated him. The ecclesiastical orders had receded into the background, but not the essentially clerical education. Thus every school in this land, public or private, primary or secondary, to-day spent most of its time producing clerks. We taught our boys to read and reproduce, to study and write, when what they would really have to do in the world which awaited them was to observe, and act, and make. Most of our children, Dr Dyson added, would have to earn their bread by tasks which would deaden rather than quicken their faculties. This was the greatest educational problem of our time; we had to educate not so much for work as for leisure. We were all going to have more and more time on our hands. This was Nature's latest gift to us. What were we to do with it? Surely it v.>as just here that the educational pursuit of the arts and crafts should step in. The working man now had leisure, and would have more rather than less. But it was new to him. He had no traditions to guide hirii, and he had been told, as a class, that without his work he was useless to himself and to the world. . CREATING NEW WANTS. Nothing was more urgent in our time than a change in the whole psychology of work and leisure, and only a welldirected education could help us. Unemployment itself might create real wealth, just as men of leisure had created it in the past, if the psychological environment of worklessness could be changed* If an enforced spell of leisure made a man all the keener to follow his hobbies and recreations, to make himself actually fitter for the next task than he was before, half the problem would be solved. The very determination of the workless to develop new interests and learn new crafts, paid or unpaid, would itself create new wants, new activities, new wealth, both human and material. It was fine to read some months ago that

a music-hall artist was the first man to discover a new spot on the planet Saturn. It was fine to read of groups of unemployed taking to new and voluntary tasks for their own and for the world's good. These things were the goal of education in the best sense. Dr Dyson went on to suggest that every child should be given arts and handicrafts, without stint, but without overloading its syllabus. The only way to do this, for children in the mass, would be to make the facilities in each district analagous to those of a modern university, each child attending a suitable selection of self-contained and specialist schools. Into such a scheme all our present technical and special schools would come. Some of those now teaching the traditional pen-and-ink subjects would have to be rearranged in one of the specialist directions, some remaining exclusively literary, some turning to science, some to the arts and crafts.