The ‘Single-Track Mind’

Sun (Auckland), Volume IV, Issue 1043, 6 August 1930, Page 8

The ‘Single-Track Mind’

STUDENTS COMMENT ON EDUCATION IT is a truism that a country gets as good a government as it deserves; and a cursory review of the records of successive local administrations within the past 20 years is sufficient to convince the observer that the public of New Zealand cannot be a very deserving one. A national love of racing and Rugby football may be a very wholesome thing in itself, but when such enthusiasm becomes a grande passion to the exclusion of a real civic pride and an intelligent national interest in public affairs, one begins to wonder whether a true sense of values is being inculcated in the national mind, and whether our mucli-vaunted democracy is as enlightened as we suppose it to be.

Thus read an editorial in “The Kiwi," magazine of the Auckland University College, the 25th volume of which has just been published. The crux of the problem, it seems, lies in our education system or, rather, in a general lack of it (continues the writer). In spite of the fact that we have hundreds of free primary schools and scores of free secondary schools distributed throughout the country, capped by a university which offers further facilities to those who so desire, the average New Zealander is not as discerning toward his true interests, material and intellectual, as public expenditure on education might warrant. Defects in departmental organisation—over-cen-tralisation, the problem of the large classes, the faulty training of our teaching staffs and the faulty methods by which our pupils are instructed in a hundred and one ill-assorted subjects—all these have been frequently pointed out and freely admitted. The university system, too, has come in for its meed of spite of the complaint made by one official that “it was not' good policy to belabour it in public.” For he must surely know that nothing has ever come from criticism made in private. The defects already mentioned are, indeed, repeated in the university, and on a much larger scale. The institution of the lecture system, whereby a university education becomes a nightmare of stenographic rhapsodies, is an inevitable result of the general quest for “useful" knowledge, to be assimilated within as brief a period as possible. The laziness of the student is thus cloaked by the air of false virtue with which he records his regular attendance at lectures, as tho easiest way out of an irksome apprenticeship Tho tendency of the modern university has been to substitute a “useful” for a “liberal" education. Dependent as it is on local support, it must supply what its patrons desire —good

chemists, good engineers, good surgeons and good schoolmasters. Undue prominence has thereby been given to mechanical tests of knowledge, and to this end the student is put in blinkers and driven along a narrow track with a high obstacle at the end of it. The result, as we see, is disastrous; success comes only by limitation. The product of such a system is a lopsided individual with a single track mind, with no comprehensiveness or versatility, and therefore with no steady judgment of affairs, no general culture.

“Liberal education," as Newman has remarked, “is simply the cultivation of the intellect as such, and its object is nothing more or less than intellectual excellence. ... In all it will be a faculty of entering with comparative ease into any subject of thought, and of taking up with aptitude any science or profession." This is sufficient to show how hopelessly our system falls short of the general ideal of education. It has been said that whereas “useful” knowledge may make a man a good engineer or a good stockbroker, it will never make him a gentleman. But it is equally true that the academic pedant does not make gentlemen either, * distinguished as he often is by a rude and scornful personal manner, and a jaundiced, cantankerous outlook on life in general. The university, as we see it today, is in short not an instrument for promoting a general coherent ideal, but a chaotic attempt to synthesise two incompatible attitudes to experience, producing on the one hand the classical type, which is pedantic, and a scientific type with an outlook that is narrow and mercenary. The real romance of the intellect, tAe realisation of artistic and scientific understanding as a great mental adventure, will only be achieved when our system of education is based, to a vastly greater extent, on a wide and unselfish outlook, and an appreciation of true culture.