"GIVE US THE YOUNG."

Sun (Christchurch), Volume V, Issue 1338, 28 May 1918, Page 4

"GIVE US THE YOUNG."

VIEWS OF AN EDUCATIONIST. SECONDARY TEACHERS' CONFERENCE. To the Editor of THE SUN. Sir, —From the meagre Press reports of the Secondary Teachers' Conference the same impression is forced on my mind as is voiced at the beginning of your Saturday's leader, entitled "ifodernism in Education,"' and that is that the symposium consisted of scraps. Although classed among the educational Ishniaels whom some would like to extrude still farther into the wilderness, if not into the Red or the Dead Sea, I have more than a parochial interest in education, and do not view it solely through the windows of the institution I am connected with, and I own 1 was rather disappointed to find that a large number of the most enlightened people of the Dominion had met together to pasture on such lean fare. Of course, 1 am well aware that routine matters must have a place at such gatherings, but I do not think they should have pride of place at any time. But at this juncture, when a world crisis has turned the whole scale of human values topsy-turvy and the basic principles of our political and social life are in the melting pot and must Ire recast, it would seem that there is higher work for an educational conference to do than to discuss for an hour whether a certain class should be called VA or some other equally appropriate name; whether high marks gained in English should he allowed to compensate for weakness in history; or whether a pass in science should excuse absolute ignorance of another subject—for that is what oue resolution amounts to. Incidentally, amidst the general obscuration of the wood by the trees, a little more gleeful dancing was done on the lid of thye coffin being prepared for the "corpus Latinum." By the way, I doubt if the supposed corpse will ever occupy this receptacle—this is a familiar trouble with things immortal. You can't kill a snake, either, by chopping off the end of its tail and interring that; and the proposal to deal Latin a deadly blow in a remote corner of the field of the world penetrated by Western culture is rather suggestive of this operation. Though the tail part of the snake resting in New Zealand is being rather badly bruised by the anti-Latinist crusaders, I take some consolation from the fact that the principal part of the snake lives elsewhere, and that if the crusaders were to try to carry the war outside New Zealand there is a reasonably good chance of their being intellectually submarined, if not physically. As I propose, sir, with your permission, to deal separately with this spirited attack on the classics, T will make no further reference to it here. What I chiefly wish to do now is to suggest to my fellow-workers that the time is calling us to lift our eyes from the small Ihings at which we have all been so long toiling and moiling with little profit often enough to both ourselves and our charges. Then startled at last by a tremendous cataclysm from our somewhat artificial and narrow professional outlook which causes us to regard a mis-spelling or a false quantity as the very superfluity of naughtiness, we ought to ask ourselves heart-searehingly whether we are sending ourselves to school sufficiently in this great crisis to learn from the signs of the times never before written in characters so bold those lessons which will enable us to readjust the orientation of the school towards society for the benefit of both. The critics of the school system are within and without our gates, and their number becomes "legion." Should we still turn a deaf oar? There have been plenty of serious subjects for conference suggested recently by such as Bernard Shaw, who complained that his education was interrupted by his schooling (a common experience, unfortunately), H. G. Wells, ex-Inspector Holmes, the author of "The Dominie's Log," ami others. Does not the passionate plea for respect for freedom and individuality voiced in Holmes's "What Is and What Might be" and in "The Dominie's Log" suggest that something might be done to rescue education from the thraldom of the examination system? It is that which produces the "Macdonaldised" schools of "The Dominie Dismissed," those small-fact foundries which Holmes had in mind when he wrote "The Tragedy of Education." A perusal of that extraordinary story "The Loom of Youth," written by a boy of 17 who had inner knowledge, suggests that the cult of athleticism might be as responsible for some of our shortcomings as overdoses of Latin. I merely mention these works to show that people are asking if our modern education is not bankrupt.

Let mc turn now to a work of another character altogether, and ask whether the arguments advanced there bear at all on the problems of education, especially higher education, ami whether questions are raised worthy of discussion by educational conferences. The breakdown of modern civilisation is a matter of supreme moment to Benjamin Kidd, the famous author of/ ''Social Evolution'' and of the "Principles of Western Civilisation." His latest work, "The Science of Power,'' to which my particular reference above is, endeavours to account for the failure of our political and social principles, to point out that the present is a time of transition to a new order of things under which new forces hitherto undreamed of are to function, and to find a more stable basis for the fabric of society than that of physical force on which it has so long rested, but which, tried in the balance of the great world crisis, has been found wanting. To illustrate my point that there arc big enough subjects ready to hand for educational conferences, and to prove that, others than schoolmasters think there is a necessary connection between social reconstruction and education, I will quote a few lines from Benjamin Kidd's last page:—"The will to attain to an end imposed on a people by the emotion of an ideal organised and transmitted through social heredity is the highest capacity of mind. It can only be imposed in all its strength through the young. So to impose it has become, the chief end of education in the future. Oh, you blind leaders who seek to convert the world by laboured disputations! Step out of the way. or the world must fling you aside. Give us the young. Give us the young, and we will create a new mimi and a new earth in a single generation.'' —1 am. etc., S. R. DR'KIXSOW St. Andrew's College, ,\1 ay 27.