AIMS IN EDUCATION

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 November 1941, Page 6

AIMS IN EDUCATION

IMPORTANCE OF SPIRITUAL ASPECT. SOUL OF CIVILISATION AT STAKE. Speaking of educational aims, Sir Richard Livingstone, president of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, said in a recent address: —“There remains the most important, most difficult and perhaps most neglected branch of education, which for want of a better word may be called spiritual. A community’s efficiency will depend on the technical and vocational training of its members —their skill in their various trades, crafts and professions; and its cohesion and stability will depend largely on their social and political education. But the quality of its civilisation depends on something else. It depends on its standards, its sense of values, its idea of what is first-rate and what is not. The vocational and the social aspects of education are essential, but the most fatal to omit is the spiritual aspect. This spiritual element is precisely what we tend to ignore. Yet nothing is more needed at the moment. The body of

our civilisation risks destruction by war, and we are too distressed by that to notice that long before the war its soul was already more than half doomed in the-turbid river of modern life.”