The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. MONDAY, APRIL 30, 1923. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION.

Southland Times, Issue 18928, 30 April 1923, Page 4

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING. Luceo Non Uro. MONDAY, APRIL 30, 1923. THE CAUSE OF EDUCATION.

“Too much education” is the cry of some people in this part of the world, but their objection to the extension and development of learning —for that is what they mean by the slogan—springs usually from a lack of understanding, and some of the resultant evils are the broken hearts of young people who are thrown back to the monotony of the ignorant. Parente should realise the importance of fitting their children for the battle of life. That is a piece of advice which for years has been dinned in our ears with unmitigating persistency; but do parents yet understand what it means? A little ’Rithmetic, a little ’Riting, and a little Reading, shorthand and typewriting, and there is the child ready for the fray! A boy may appeal to a father for something more and be greeted with the remark that his parents had no more, but that is a hideously unfair attitude, because the conditions to-day differ so much from those of the past. Today it is not enough that the child shall be taught to work with its hands. Boys and girls who have been armed with nothing better than that are not properly equipped for the “battle of life,” and their failures

must be excused in that their armory is insufficiently stocked. In a young country we are apt to look on the Arts as the ornamente and luxuries of the leisured, and so MuSic, Literature and Painting make disappointingly slow progress among our people. One can hear the “too much education” man declaring that a knowledge of Literature or of Music will not help a man to milk cows, to build a washhouse or to dig a ditch. He isr entirely wrong. What he really means to say is that if a man is properly educated he will not undertake manual labour, but that problem we can deal with as it arises—in the meantime more ditches are being dug and more cows are being milked by machinery. But will it be denied that the man who has a grounding in Literature and Music has not the advantage in the long nights in the country, that his leisure is not more fruitful? Writings are not Literature because they are dull; Music is not great because it is wearying and unintelligible. They owe their status to their qualities which give them immortality. No committee of experts can ensure to any work a life time extending over centuries, that can come only by reason of the quality of the work itself—it must be “good” in the full sense of that embracing term. If then the child has no means of walking fairly along these ways; if it cannot take full advantage of leisure and is unable to bring taste to control imagination, what hope has beauty in the years to come and what must be the fate of the future generations? Too much education is a damning cry, because it is either the grunt of the ignorant or the cry of selfishness. Both classes, we think, can obtain valuable assistance for the remedying of their ills from the articles on education which we have agreed to publish as part of the Southland Educational Institution’s “Education Week.” Miss Drennan, the Principal of the Girls’ High School has opened the week with a statement for the “Aesthetic side of Education,” and we commend her remarks to our readers: they are of great value because she is talking about the future of every child in Southland and of Southland itself.