The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING "Luceo New Uro." MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 1935. THIS EDUCATION

Southland Times, Issue 22491, 28 January 1935, Page 6

The Southland Times. PUBLISHED EVERY MORNING "Luceo New Uro." MONDAY, JANUARY 28, 1935. THIS EDUCATION

The intelligent man is an honest man, honest with himself at any rate, and the extent by which we fall short of honesty is the measure of our failure to achieve full intelligence. Doubless the chairman of the Southland Education Board had some similar thought in his mind when he spoke at the Guipmies Bush school jubilee on the aims of the education system. Mr Rice expressed in the following terms:

To train citizens imbued with high ideals and with sufficient culture to enable them to appreciate the scientific and natural beauties of this wonderful world; to train them to read intelligently, and think intelligently, so that they may be able to apply the results of their reading and thinking to the solution of their daily problems—this is the aim.

In this statement, as far as it goes, there is nothing for which there will not be applause; but Mr Rice associated with his admirable summation of the aims of education, far beyond achievement in this country, a statement which, substantially sound, has influences and implications that are pernicious. This statement unfortunately is an educational platitude, and, as in the case of most platitudes, its influence has sprawled beyond the limits of the sharp definition set by its initial mint. Mr Rice, of course, was conscious of the maturity of the idea when he said: I personally think it is more important to train children for good citizenship than to turn out brilliant scholars.

No one will quarrel with the virtuous principle underlying this statement; but unfortunately the phrasing carries with it the assumption that there is some antagonism between brilliant scholarship and good citizenship, that one may not be a good citizen if one has the ill-fortune to be a

brilliant scholar. Mr Rice did not mean that, but there are many people who carry the importance of “good citizenship” to such lengths that they make it antagonistic to scholarship, and even subordinate scholarship to those non-scholastic functions which are believed to be essential to good citizenship. In most discussions, of course, arguments whirl round the definitions and -in this case the excuse for what may be termed the anti-scholastic bias is to be found in a mistaken idea of what constitutes scholarship. A capacity to pass examinations is nothing more than a capacity to pass examinations; scholarship goes deeper, is more honest and, though more “cultural” than vocational in its garb, is the fruit of education. There is no doubt, however, that the good citizen ideal when set up as the antagonist rather than the expression of scholarship, and when a “good citizen” is merely a disciplined citizen, leads to the subordination of the fundamentals of education to what may be. termed nonscholastic frills. The Iron Duke declared that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton; but Waterloos are merely incidental, important and influential though they be, to the world’s progress and to man’s life, for the greater part of his days are spent in the years of peace. War is a crisis for which he must be prepared, but it is not to be the pre-occupa-tion of all his days. Physical being is desirable in the scholar, but it is not too much to say that because it is held by many to be essential to good citizenship it receives, proportionately, more attention, more applause than brilliant or even “good” scholarship. This, of course, is in keeping with the spirit of an age which makes more fuss of its athletes than its teachers, gives greater praise and larger rewards to its entertainers than to its rulers. The point is that the good scholar, the brilliant scholar should be a good, a brilliant citizen, but the view that admits of any suggestion of antagonism between them supports, perhaps without being aware of the fact, all those notions which tend to reduce the status of scholarship in. the schools, the place where it should be enthroned, and which at a later stage find expression in a community eager to place its physical comfort and pleasure before its mental integrity, to sacrifice an acceptance of decent conduct born of an appreciation of its advantages to a fearful obedience given with an eye furtively keen for a loophole for personal advantage. Mr Rice .must not think we are involving him in these enormities. His iteration of a platitude has offered the opportunity to draw attention to the fact that if the schools are properly balanced the brilliant scholar will be a good citizen, whatever may be his political views, and that the ignorant, the imperfectly educated citizen, no matter how physically fit, no matter what his athletic prowess, is not a “good” citizen. No state can afford to sacrifice the mind to the body, and before ignorance can be held to ensure bliss we must be sure it is a folly to be wise.