EDUCATION AND INSTRUCTION.

Stratford Evening Post, Volume XXXI, Issue 99, 9 December 1911, Page 4

EDUCATION AND INSTRUCTION.

Sir Edmund Barton recently emphasised the difference between educating t; •. young and merely instructing them when presenting prizes to a school ::: New South Wales, on speech day. Tc his mind, education means the application of thought to fact so that the mind may he trained to make of fact; lessons for the work of life. And he illustrated his point in this way:—

“As an instance, anyone can reel off a number of common facts. Can anyone tell me when the Battle of Trafalgar was fought? I only know it was on such and such a day in 1805. But it is not everybody who could tell not only between whom it was fought, but why it was fought, and how the fight influenced the destinies of the world, and in many schools the pupil will carry away a knowledge of the date without the slightest idea of the other three elements, which are ail that' really matter—a fight that so influenced the destinies of the world that by giving Britain a supremacy of the seas it assured the peace and prosperous development of her possessions, including this one, safe from attack for more than a century. 'This is a fact worth knowing, and it is arrived at by considering what happened afterwards, and which of the events that did happen afterwards aie traceable to’ that great fact. That is a specimen of the educative influence in schools as differing from mere instruction.”