The Southland Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. THURSDAY, 18th APRIL, 1889.

Southland Times, Issue 10141, 18 April 1889, Page 2

The Southland Times PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. THURSDAY, 18th APRIL, 1889.

Less than a month ago Piofessor J. Macmillan Brown of (Jhrietchurch addressed the North Canterbury Educational Institute in a speech oi' remarkable eloquence, originality and power. The occasion was his retirement from the office of President of the Institute, and, speaking to the members after an interval of five years, he seems to j have braced himself for a great and signal effort. 'J he scope of his remarks was naturally didactic, and the aim, to excite a strong feeling of responsibility and to implant the very highest ideal in the minds of the teachers before him. Professor Brown is himself manifestly an educational enthusiast, and his fervour, his knowledge and his imagination have enabled him to lay under tribute heaven and earth, history,science and philosophy in illustration and enforcement of his views. There is a fine and glowing etherealism about his performance, from first to last, and this etherealism is both his weakness and his strength. He has produced a magnificent essay and, if often unpractical, has impressed on his hearers some controverted truths with unanswerable adroitness aad force. Two things that had come to be of evil name and that were supposed to stand hopelessly condemned by public opinion Piofessor Brown has set himself unreservedly and strenuously _ to defend. Competition and examination he shows to have their root and necessity in the very essence and constitution of thinga. j 11 What are they but' the laws of natural selection and of survival of the fittest appearing in^ the narrower sphere of modern civilisation ? And no sec- ■ tiou of the pre-millennial life of man can ever rid itself of them, unless it be ia some lotos-eating paradise that , imitetee gleep or death, $bey ma i

like breathing and digestion, conditions ; of existence." The indication of these two factors in all liealthy education is final and triumphant, and what educational reformers will have to do is not to banish, but to regulate and abate them. The delusion that •' knowledge for its own sake " will ever corae to be the efficient motive and incitement for its acquisition by youth ia dealt with by Professor Brown with singular ingenuity and skill. It is demolished in a series of paragraphs that are distinguished by equal profundity, eloquence and truth. "How are children to feel it a3 a real thing if they have not reached the final stage of knowledge whence they can look back and review it — unless their teachers should paint the glories of it, and they should get the live thus second hand ? . , . I fear that until human natare is refashioned there is no other way of driving the youthful mind through the dreary preliminaries of any branch of knowledge than by examination and competition." We should- like to quote further, but must forbear. Professor Brown speaks in terms of strong dissatisfaction of the existing methods ( of' examination, allowing that they test, besides " memory and book knowledge, common sense, quickness of faculty, conscientiousness of work, method and neatness," but denouncing them as fail~ ing to stimulate "the designing and reasoning faculties and power of imaginative thought and expression." " There is, I am satisfied, something wrong with our systems of training or of examination, when every trace of quaintness or fancy or character is so completely effaced or suppressed." It is necessary to run over hastily what is one of the most brilliant portions of Piofessor Brown's address — that wherein he pletds for the infusion of enthusiasm into the work even of primary school teachers. The self-sacrifice necessary to make teaching more than perfunctory, to avoid " bleaching knowledge of its ethical force and reducing it to the baldness and exactitude of a mathematical formula " — this he holds, by a kind' of paradox,to be the least laborious as well as the most fruitful, method of instruction : and he calls on teachers to exhilarate while exhausting themselves in the effort to mould the character and " touch the imagination into life,"

We agree with the lecturer while he urges on the teacher those needs of his position — travel and constant lenewal of knowledge and experience — to counteract the isolation of his position, " the petty trammels of localism and the drowsiness of habitual life ;" and further, when he counsels the deepening- of knowledge by " rooting it ia wisdom and in ethical truth." Where we differ from him is in his formulation of the doctrine that " dogmatic teaching of morality is not to be desired in schools " because it " would soon degenerate into cant." This maxim he makes the Bignal for launching into a dilutation on the teacher's almost unbounded influence in moulding the character of his pupils -^ an influence alleged to be far beyond the potency of objective truth. This view is pressed with the loftiest injunction to be true to so sacred a trust and prerogative, and to rise into the very empyrean of purity, of manliness, and of virtue. And no objection can be taken to this high invitation. But when it is said that the character of any teacher is to be the ethicil standard of the school, and this independently of appeal to any code of morals, it is felt at once that a subversion has been suggested of the very foundation of accountableness and duty. The proposition is so monstrous as to be almost beyond the pale of argument, and it is humiliating to find it in the mouth of a man so gifted and professing to be guided by the dictates of reason, philosophy, and the conditions of human life. Admitting that morality could only come filtered through the personality of men and women, how long should we have to wait before the teachers in our schools had reached the perfectness that would make emanations from their nature the law of the lives of their pupils ? Of only one Man that ever lived can it be &aid that His life wa3 the infallible rule of human duty ; and it was from Him that the world received at the same time a code of ethics constructed for all nations and for ail time. We can imagine no more egregious trifling with the subject of the moral training of the young than to be referred to the sublimated example that in some day of Millennial perfection is to be exhibited by the teachers in our schools. We are far from undervaluing the influence that the pure life and chivalrous bearing of many teachers of youth are exercising over those committed to their care ; but such, we are persuaded, will be the last to imagine that their conduct could be the equivalent for systematic instruction in religion and morals, or could be more than an adjunct in forming the character of the young. There is one Book and one only that, containing as it does the ultimate sanction of morality, can appeal to the consciences of youth with the authority needful to compel their submission, and to their hearts with the motives necessary to secure taeir love. It is a mere clouding of the atmosphere of argument to speak of such a Book as " profaned by the routine work of the schools " But we can venture no further. Let us close with an acknowledgment of the magnificent plea for immortality set forth by Professor Brown in a portion of his address — a plea on which we can put no greater honour than to say that it is worthy to stand beside the argument of similar strain and scope with which recently the Chief Secretary for Ireland beat down the frigid philosophy of the Agnostics.