IDEALS OF EDUCATION

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume LX, Issue 18089, 16 May 1933, Page 2

IDEALS OF EDUCATION

CULTURAL STANDARDS DANGER OF a DECLINE CHARACTER AND INTELLECT ‘•ln the matter 'of culture I do hold that we are in danger in New Zealand of departing from sound standards, said the Rev. H. K. Archdal , headmaster of King’s College, Auckland in liis retiring presidential address at tne annual conference of the Registered Secondary Schools’ Association at Wellington. “I have been told by many experienced teachers that the primary schoo training in New Zealand is not so thorough as it used to be aud the state of arithmetic and English grammar at the proficiency standard is adduced as a good example of this declension. “The fact is that unless we can persuade the great mass of the public to be more sincere and honest in their thinking, the splendid educational traditions of the Old Land will gradually be lost and an inferior educational ideal and method will come to a position of dominance. We are supposed to be the most British of all parts of the Empire but I see far too little honest endeavour to apply the full principles of the educational traditions of the Old country to the circumstances of New Zealand We. . “It is not so many years since that distinguished Manchester scholar, Professor R. S. Comvav, told the University of Otago that a generation which knew practically nothing of the elassio aud classical antiquity and was not taught the religion of their fathers was being brought up in the gutter educationally. That is strong language, but it is certain that no great national culture will ever be created by a generation whose roots in the past have been so largelv cut, whose knowledge ot Greece, Rome and Judea is a diminishing quantity. It is well to be reminded that the old educational tradition from which we have sprung believed in thq twin aristocracies of character and intellect, and that it has always laid great stress on knowledge for its own sake, although it has never been keen on isolating the intellect from other aspects of the personality. “All the schools represented in tins association hold religion to be the basis of all sound education: they have religious worship and religious teaching embedded in their life. It is quite obvious to us that New Zealand cannot claim to be carrying on the British tradition of education while religion receives its present treatment in _ the Government schools and in the university. “The best English idea of discipline is to establish an order that creates order in a growing community. A liberty that is really license will never create social freedom.’’