WAIRARAPA TEACHERS.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXV, Issue 10713, 23 September 1913, Page 6

WAIRARAPA TEACHERS.

AX INTERESTING- ADDRESS. "I DEALS OF EDUCATION." Under the auspices of the "Waira-i-ii pa branch of the Teachers' Institute, Mr l'\ 11. Bakewell, M.A.. inspector oi' schools, delivered a lecture mi the Technical School on Saturday afternoon, to an auclienco of over ninety teacher*. Mr F. L. Combs, president, briefly introduced (lie lecturer, and remarked that the Hue representative meeting clearly indicated that the teachers had appreciated Mr Bakewcll's previous lecture, and were anticipating a similar pleasure that day. He felt that they would not be disappointed. Mr Bakewell apologised for what he considered his unpreparedness. He stated that he had not been well of lute and possibly that would be some excuse for his overlooking till the previous day, the fact that he hud promised to lecture on "Ideals of Education."

It was not long, however, before the meeting was convinced that the apology was quite unnecessary- The lecturer revelled in his subject. Interspersed as it was with line humour, the knowledge imparted delighted his hearers and should afford food for reflection for many days to come.

Mr Bakewell first sketched the ideal of education, which prevailed among the Greeks. To secure the Greek idea! there had' to be a, physical, a moral and a mental training. They found the Greek aiming to produce the beautiful, the emotional, the clever. His ideal was a man of taste, of refinement, of imagination, of culture in its highest physical and aesthetic sense.

A sterner and more strenuous system was necessary to secure the Roman ideal. The youth to be fitted for the function and duties of a Roman citizen had to be trained to a life of self denial, of endurance, and of perseverance. He was to be a law giver to tho world, to bind and to break every thing to the Roman rule.

The influence of the mother loomed' large in the Roman 6.ystem. At his mother's knee the Roman youth had the first seeds of patriotism sown that in later life produced the man of action, insatiable iri conquest, and intensely patriotic. The lecturer then passed on to the Monastic idea—that the child was by nature endowed with certain evil instincts and activities, which it was the special duty and function of his teacher to eliminate or eradicate. The "Old Adam'' must be got rid of: the child was full of devils which education, mainly by & system of flagellation, was to cast out. Proverbs and catechisms, some of which" Mr Bake"well quoled, showed very clearly how deeply this idea was imbued in the old scholastic mind. N and how careful his teachers were that the child himself should know it. In their modern superior wisdom some people were apt to smile at some of these old time ideas of education; but really it was remarkable how little we had improved on them. "Train up a child in the way.-he should' go: and when he is oid, he will not depart from" it." Here they had education in a nutshell. That could not be improved upon for , an ideal. The lecturer would have liked to enlarge and elaborate this monastic ideal. He confessed that this old idea had considerable attractions for him.

Mr Bakewelr passed on to what he railed the "empty vessel"' idea. The child was no longer deemed to be full of devils, hut full of emptiness; and the educational ideal of those" who held these views was to fill these empty vessels with knowledge or what passed for knowledge. It was to he hanged in, crammed in, got in no matter how; but the tighter it was in the better. Some of them no doubt had had experience of this ideal. In fact it seemed to him that our secondary and university teaching stfll worked on the "empty vessel" idea. Of course the complement of the empty vessel theory was the examination system, the inspector coming along to see that the vessel was .really full, that there was no corner into which a little more knowledge could not be jammed in. The last ideal was based on the theory that the child was not an empty vessel and certainly not a vessel of wrath, but a~ vessel containing all that is necessary to develop into the perfect being. This is the education of .Pestalozzi and Frobel and is the cultivation and development of the mforn -self-activities of the child. Hence they .had tho plant analogy and the unfolding.of the bud. The Montessori system was the highest development of Oris ideal. The lecturer then proceeded to make comparisons between the various systems, more especially between the old Monastic system and the modern idea of self development; in other words, the sit-still, do-as-you-are-told idea and what some people call the go-as-you-please idea. To ' his mind they represented the kinetic arc of the educational pendulum—the extremes of swing. . Mr Bakewell could well fancy that some of his audience would say that he hadn't told them anything new. that they were getting ideals held up to them every day and that they wanted an ideal that would help a teacher in a 'town school to teach a class of 70 children; or that would help a backblock teacher in an environment of logs, stumps, and mud who had to teach 14 or 15 subiects to six standards and 1 three classes of in-

fants. "Give us an ideal that will meet these cases and you might be doing something good," he fancied be could hear his critics saying. He j confessed that ho could think of no educational ideal that entertained such a state of things; in fact, they were directly antagonistic to an ideal of asy kind. But he might question the critic as to what ideal or aim he was striving for: the Greek, the Roman, the diabolical idea, the plant idea? Or, was he just trying to get through with the minimum trouble to himself and without any particular aim or ideal of any kind? To the lecturer's mind, no matter what the unsatisfactory circumstances and environment of a teacher might be, the carrying out of an ideal was possible. Mr Bake well's ideal in such circumstances would be suggested by tho four simple rules—addition, substraction, multiplication, and division. The child came to the teacher with some store of knowledge that was good, was the teacher adding to that store? He came with some store of knotvledge that was evil, was the teacher substracting from that store? He possessed qualities or characteristics that made for good, was the teacher increasing, muitiplying( those qualities and characJ teristics ? He,, possessed some inclinations and characteristics that made for evil, was the teacher, to the best of his ability, dividing and cancelling those evil attributes ? In other words was the educator teaching the child - to know himself, to respect himself, to control himself; if so, to Mr I Bakewell's mind, the teacher was ' meeting and fulfilling that highest ideal of which the poet sang: [ "Self reverence, self knowledge, self I control—- [ These three alone lead life to sovf ereign power."

Loud applause greeted the lecturer on his resuming his seat, and! on the motion of the president a very hearty vote of thanks was accorded Mr Bakewell, M.A., for his masterly.lecture.