NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WOMEN.

Wanganui Chronicle, 14 May 1901, Page 1

NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WOMEN.

The following able and interesting papsr was read by Miss Fraser, M.A., at the Meeting of the Women's National Council on Monday evening : —

LOOKING BACKWARD

It was a favourite saying of one of Britain's sanest Statesmen, "He will not look forward to posterity who will not look backward to his ancestors," and in a time when those busied with the work of education are chiefly occupied in casting eager envious eyes around* and carelees dim eyes forward, it has seemed to me that it will bo wise for us to-night to turn our eyes backward, so that—perchance for some of us—the looks we cast around may become -calm and generous, and those we cast forward keen and wise, even as the vision of a seer. We look at America and at Germany and see Kindergarten work flourishing in those countries; we look at Germany and see what she has done for technical education, and we say to our governors, "Wo mast not be beaten in the contest of the nations give us kindergartens, give us -technical schools." and the good, kind government gives us what we fondly call kindergartens, and what we fondly call technical schools, and we are satisfied with the name. But how many of those who raise the cry for kindergartens or for technical schools, how many who aid in founding such schools, nay, how many even of those who teach in'such schools, have in the dimmest way grasped the principles upon which their work is founded? Schools founded in ignorance of their underlying principles, or in sheer 'envy of other nations, are not likely to be a very sure foundation for the future of the-"coming'generations. Let us then look backward and find out and weigh for ourselves the leading ideas of those who first advocated systematic education of the race. What were their reasons for advocating education, and how best were the ideas to be. put into practice? We are very much in the position of the man who "could not see the forest for the trees!" Let us for a time try to sec with the eyes of men who have breadth of vision to see the wood as a whole, and keen-; ness of vision to take account also of individual trees. Plato, the Greek, and Milton the- Englishman, laid down principles in our day—'principles, which, if understood—would change the spirit of most of our teaching—home training, kindergarten, primary, secondary, technical and university. We have—most of us—grown into the idea that education is an end in itself, instead of a means to an end—the up-lifting of our nation, not to a commercial or intellectual or artistic equality, with other nations, but to a likeness with the God in whose image we are made. The most Godlike nation—the nation in whose thought the idea of God is ever present, is for the time being the greatest in art or in literature—What age gave to the world the great masterpieces of Green sculpture?;— The ages when the Greeks had j in them a living faith in their gods. What I ages gave us the grand Hebrew psalms, the noble Gothic architecture, the beautiful Italian paintings, our great nineteenth century literature? In each case it was an a<re of faith, existing as a living force in the hearts of a people as a whole. Even in commerce the same principle holds, for when the worker forgets God his work loses its perfection, and his market is soon lost: the merchant forgets truth, and hia name falls into dishonour. Longfellow reminds us—

In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest enre, Each remote and unseen part, For the Gods see everywhere. Let us do our work as well— Both tho unseen and the seen— Make a house where gods .may dwell, Beautiful, entire and clean. History then assures us that it' is well

for a nation to keep the fear of God before its eyes. Let us hear what Plato has to say in laying down <his scheme for an ideal education.

In speaking of the education to be given to those whom he calls "guardians"—those specially trained for the protection and management of the ceuntry—he says: — "What, then, is the education to be? Perhaps we could hardly find a better than that which- the experience of the past has already discovered, which consists, I believe, in gymnastic for the body and music for the mind." Music is to be understood m a much wider sense tlian the modern one, and includes all literature, even the faoies told to the children in their earliest years. A beginning of this musical education is to be made as soon as intelligence begins to dawn, and the musical education is to take precedence of the gymnastic, Plato's reason being, "In every work the beginning-is the most important part, «specially in dealing with anything young and tender, for that is the time when any impression which one may desire to communicate, is most readily stamped and taken. Shall we, then, permit our children, without scruple, to hear any fables composed by any authors indifferently, and so to receive into their minds opinions generally the reverse of those which, when they are grown to manhcod, we shall think they ought to entertain. Then apparently our first duty will be to exercise a superintendence over the authors of fables, selecting their good productions and rejecting the bad. And tbo selected fables we shall advise our mothers -and' rmrses to repeat to therr children, that they may thus mould thenminds with tWfables.' But we shall have to repudiate the greater part of those now in vogue" On searching for tha reason why Plato would reject so many babies, wo find that his main reason is because they give a false or ignoble idea of God. Ho says: "God is good in reality, and is to be so represented." The first aim, then, in tihe highest education is to train ; children to the just idea of God, and as Plato wisely points out, this work can never be so well done as in" the plastic years when the child is in the sole care of its mother. If the deep, all-informing sense of a God is to become vital in a mortal, it must be part of his very fibre, grow with, him from his earliest years in growing beauty and harmony; or else it must be sought out in late years with anguish of soul,, amid the fierce fires of mental and spiritual conflict Which purify the seeker's soul so that he may see God, but which leave his nature seared and hardened so as^to distort and obstruct the God-like in him. This, then, is Plato's first object in education, and why? I take it that hia reason is that a man's whole character, and therefore his lifts, and tihe lives of those with whom he has to do, depends upon his thoughts, and if thought is ignoble, life soon becomes ignoble. We pridie ourselves on "keeping our thoughts to ourselves," but such keeping is beyond "the power even of the strongest. Slowly, slowly, but, most •surely, our dominating thoughts stamp themselves on our actions, our gestures, our very muscles; end if we strive to act contrary to our thoughts, with a; view of concealing our true opinions,; there very soon appears upon us, in mysterious subtle symbols, the character, false, insincere. * If, then, we wish for a lofty i\oblo' nation, we must give lofty ideas, and give them most early. I have heard mothers argue thus: "I am not going to fill my child's mind with ideas of; God, for I should be taking advantage of his helplessness in giving him ideas which I cfinnot really prove for myself.*' To such I would answer, "To be etrictly logical, you should never give y^nr child a draught of milk, or of water, lor you cannot provo otherwise than experimentally, that' milk end water help to nourish human iife: and you have abundant experimental proof that the truly God-fearing nations have in all ages been the great nations, and the truly gnat men have not been those that forgot God." Happy is the child

whoso lot ia cast in a home where the mother with grave reverence, not fully comprehending, yet humbly believing the mystery of Godhead, strives to fill her child's mind with the highest ideas human thought can reach unto. Would that mothers everywhere could realise the importance of those first years when the child ia literally their own to train or to neglect. Too often the first years are simply wasted, the child is fed and clothed, fondled, aumired, laughed at, encouraged in funny sayings, but earnestly and gently trained, no. The physical needs are most tenderly supplied, but mental and moral training is too often postponed. Just think what an enormous advantage it would be to our primary schools if the children entering thorn at the ago of five had been trained as Plato prescribes. Such a training would mean that they began their literary training filled with reverence, and with, enthusiasm, for what is entnusiasm in its- primary meaning but "A God Within?" These two qualities are among the very first requisites of a teachable mind. It would mean that to begin with the children were obedient, whereas now the privilege of giving the first lessons in that virtue is too often left to the teacher; it would mean that they were conscientious according to the measure of their yeara and their ability, whereas at present conscientious work is none too common among people of all ages. A lady in writing to me a short tima ago from, another part of thp colony, asked me whether,'in writing this paper, I could meet the charge she had frequently heardu urged, that girls do not equal boys in 'thoroughness of work. I have never myself heard such a charge brought against -iris in particular, and my own experience leads me to characterise is as tinjust. I have worked with both boys and girls, both men and women; and, given equal ability, the girl's and the, woman's work has been more, rather than lean, thorough'than the boys' or the men's. The charge might fairly be made a general one, I think, for it is not very common in any sphere of activity to find absolute thoroughness. We all have to suffer oh account of carpenters who use unseasoned timber, cabinet-makers who use the glue-pot instead of the screw-driver, housemaids who do not sweep under the mats, plumbers who mend one hole and make twoi teachers whose aim is to give information rather than to train natural faculty, doctors who make careless diagnoses, clergymen who take no trouble to understand .human nature, lawyers who think more of their fees than of justice, and at is our own fanif partly. We put up with a system of training that uoes nob make for conscientious, thorough work. A few years back I was having a cabinet, which had been mad© _in Wanganui, put into place by a cabhiet-maker in another town. After a- time the man said, "Do you mind telling me who made this? It'a the best bit of. work I've seen this long time. I once did work as good, but people won't pay for it, and I've had to come down." We New Zealanders, by our preference for the cheap and showy and unthorough, had caused this man, who evidently loved a piece of good work, to lower his ideal, and with it himself, and make him say, "I've had to come down.': I f?ar we have helped many another man to "come- down," and the reason I am convinced is in our neglect of Plato's first principle of education. Milton expresses just the same idea in his letter on education. Here are his words: "The end, then, of learning is u> repair the ruins of our first parents by regaining to know God aright, and out of that" knowledge to love Hun, to imitate Him, to be like Him aa we may, the nearest by possessing our souls.of true virtue, which, being united to the hoavenly grace of faith, makes up the highest .perfection." Having made clear their first principle in education, both Plato and Milton insist upon the great value of literature as one means of training men in knowledge of God: Milton devotes himself to explaining how the young may be" most expeditiously trained in foreign languages, so that they may become acquainted • with the literature of those languages.: The reason for having a foreign language is that we may become masters of the li-r terature, and thus masters of the highest thought. If IMs ideal were in the minds of our teachers of, language we should have less gerund grinding and more translation in. our classes.

Plato, on the other hand, shows definitely how he expects the study of literature to influence character. He would present to his pupils only such literature as would make them yearn to be brave in facing death, strong and patient in bearing personal loss, grave and self-controlled,-true, temperate, scornera of bribery, n»i greedy even for honestly-earned money. He then passes on to consider what; literary form is the most suitable to use in the instruction of the learner, and descidea ; that the drama, the simple narrative, and \ the epic may all be used, provided that the I style is kept simple and severe, free from anything that will draw the mind of the learner from the main object of his study. What a revolution it would make in the study of our own noble literature could all teachers be filled with Plato's ideas! "Literature is studied because it influences life." Cannot someone convince teachers from kindergarteners upto university pro - I f essors of the truth of that statement and ! force them to act upon it or vacate their positions. Only the other day I heard of students passing a. University examination ion Carlyle's "Sartor Rosartus," and opening the book only once to write an essay which my informant naively told me "they got mostly out of the introduction." Whoever drew up the syllabus of English literature for New Zealand University students certainly chose such works as should have a most noble influence on the minds of our students, but weak examiners, blind teachers and silly students use it so as to frustrate the aim of the University; nay, worse than to frustrate a noble aim—that of winning a little cheap and useless glory by a pretence of knowledge. If any book in our literature will help a youth to honesty of thought and breadth of thought and vividness of imagination, "Sartor Resartus" is such a book, and yet these noble fruits are all given up for the fleeting joy of passing. In the long ran, passing matters not at all; what the book has helped one to matters all in all. A few teachers j still wonder why English literature should ba given a place in our schools, and profess ,a kind of pious horror that Shakespeare and Milton and Tennyson and Browning should be put into the hands of school children, as if the act were a casting of pearls before swine. Children must read something, and if we teachers do not teach them to appreciate real literature, they will choose false and grow like what they read. We can all remember our impressionable teens, when for days at a time we were in our imagination the "e«ld, proud beauty" or "the sweet shrinking flower-faced maiden" of our latest romance. These imaginative days will never come again, and we must do our best to n.ake the imagined self—which tends to become the real self—sweet and noble and true. We have good literature, suited to the capacity of quite youne children. Then let us use it, and be grateful to those who gave it to us, always remembering— pardon my saying it once again—-"Litera-ture influences life, and that is why 1 am teaching it." Here are Milton's words describing the effect of sane treatment;of literature in our schools: "This; would show the learners what religious, what glorious, what magnificent use might be made of poetry, both in divine and human things. There would .then appear in pulpits (,by pulpits Milton means all speaking places— merely the clegyman's pulpit) other visages, other gestures, and stuff otherwise wrought than we now sit under, otttimes to as great a trial of our patience,as any other that they now preach to us. , Passing from the teaching of literature to the teaching of music proper, Plato applies the same principle. Music is to be taught because of its effect upon the character The same noble simplicity is to oe sought after as in literature. Music is 1 cood only in so far as it springs from, a good character in the originator, audtends to good character in the learner. Would that Plato's words could,£e understood, and our ears be spared the false music we so often hear. It is pitifully enough, no uncommon thing for one whose ear would be tortured by a false interval to enjoy and applaud music full of false or trashy, or -even of degrading feeling. Could teacn.ers of music only realise that the meaning of a composition is really the music of it, we should hear in the work of their wipils a living voice, and not see merely a marvellous gymnastic performance. Hear Plato's words: "Good language and good harmony and grace, and good rhythm all depend upon a good nature, by which I do not mean that silliness which, by courtesy, we call good nature, but a. mind that _is really well and nobly constituted in its moral character. . . . and the-ab-sence of grace, and rhythm, and harmony is closely allied to an evil style and an evil character." Character forming, we

observe, is the reason throughout all Plato's scheme. Character is what we should be especially zealous for in all our teaching, and it is too often the last thing aimed at in our schools. We are forced to make the pupils seem to know, as if the knowledge in itself were our aim, and the, seeming knowledge is often won at the expense of honesty, at the expense of a stunted and undeveloped brain, at the expense of imagination, a.t the expense of thorough %vork. We shall have to pay the penalty, for if we have not learned reverence, trutli, simplicity in our childhood, we find them hard in practice in later life. There is a most urgent need for the training of teachers to appreciate the true aim of their work, to see some goal m«re remote than next inspection day, to give them a principle that will vivify and cheer and «nnoble their high calling. It is pathetic to see men and women, faithful and zealous up to the measure of their ability, toiling away in dull drudgery ex, .what ought to be the most delightful <,f tasks, -simply because they know not .'or what they work. The teacher whose reason or whose instinct has convinced him of his high aim, takes with him to his schoolroom an inspiring! cheerful, sincere ?presemce, which in itself creates an atmosphere of earnest endeavour, leading to thorough work. , But I must pass on to the second part of Plato's prescription, and also Milton's, for the training of the ruling class-^-gym-nastics for the body. Plato's ideal man must not be in any way one-sided; Too undivided devotion to what he , terms music might develop the philosophic side of man's nature at the expense of Ms active side, and/gymnastics must be used as a corrective; but, as in all that Plato advocates, the gymnastic training must be on a simple, moderate system, and the object of gymnastio training must ever be kept in mind—namely, the harmonious training of the whole man. The diet of the true gymnast must at all times be kept plain and frugal, Athenian confectionery being .especially mentioned as something to be avoided. The true place of athletics in schools is one of the perennial subjects of discussion. It would be well for our boys and youths if athletics could be given such a rational place among, them as to do away with the little monsters who boast of the cream puffs and the trifles and the other unwholesome, luxuuries they consume. Self-restraint is one of the elementary manly virtues, and the plain dieting necessary to make a good gymnast might be better employed than it is in training boys to self-restraint; We all know and despise the little glutton whose cheeks resemble nothing so much as a very unwholesome edition of his own cream puffs; and the best way to rid him out of the land is to require from him a moderate amount of gymnastic work. On the other hand—and here I think the stronger ca/ution is needed-r-the amount of athletics allowed must not be so : great as to develop the active at the expense of the philosophic qualities. It is here that the common error lies. Too great attention to athletics glorifies the meanii int« an end; and athletics, instead of helping in the harmonious development of the individual, tend to degrade him by developing the lower at the expense of the higher. The following sentence from Plato will put clearly the whole question of the vexed question of athletics, "Moreover, in the exercise and toils which he imposes, upon himself, his object will be rather to; stimulate the spirited element of his nature than to gain strength; and he will not — like athletics in general—take the prescribed food and i exercise merely for the sake of muscular power." Later on, he says, "Those who have devoted themselves to gymnastics exclusively become ruder than they ought to be; while those who have devoted ' themselves to music are made softer than they ought to be. But where harmony exists between the philosophic andi the active side of man we have a race both temperate and brave." Now, here comes in the reason for founding technical and . kindergarten schools. Our educations in -the past has tended to develop the philosophic at the expence of the "active faculties, and] we need kindergartens which, when wisely managed, certainly oim at an all-round development of the child* nature. A good kindergarten provides -plenty of Plato's "music," and at the same time wise gymnastics in the shape of exercise for eye and hand, as well as for the larger, muscles. But a kindergarten teacher, above all others, needs to understand the principles upon which she is working, for it is her's to work more weal or more woe to her charge than any later teacher can undo. Too often a kindergarten is set up with the idea of giving children a pleasant time, and teaching ttan a.little, but the true teacher cannot rest at that. The technical school, again, is a remedy on the other side. Many a workman was able to approach his work from the active side o*nly. He could never become a perfect worker till he looked at it from the philosaphich side also, and to. give him a complete view technical schools were established. But I am beginning to touch upon a subject which will be much more fully and more ably treated at this conference than I can hope to treat it. I merely refer to the subject of kindergartens and technical schools to show the real reasons why we should desire to have them—namely, because when founded in a true spirit they tend to perfect the race. We surely could not, even to-day, find a higher or more rational ideal education than Plato prescribes for his guardians. He carries on his subject in the most fascinating way, dividing the guardians into sub-classes, the highest of which become the supreme guardians, and receive a more elaborate education than that prescribed for the lower classes; but tKfe principles involved are still the same. 1 As regards women's education, which is still considered a modern question, Plato believed that a woman should receive the highest education of which she was capable; that it should be on exactly the same lines as 'a man's education; that whenever she showed special musical or gymnastic ability she should be placed where that ability, could be used for the good of the State, even if it carried into the highest class of guardians. Moreover, any woman gaining such honour, Plato would in his ideal republic marry to one of the men guardians. / , There is advanced legislation springing from the education of women. Plato was ready for it over 2,000 years ago; he "faced , the logical outcome of universal education, and carried it to a conclusion which would cause most of the members of the advanced and liberal Parliament of New Zealand to quail. This question of women s education I touch upon but lightly,: for what has been said earlier applies to boys and to girls alike. My aim in writing at all was to turn our "thoughts back to great principles, which, if rightly understood and acted upon, would raise the ideal of education for boys and girls alike. A time is coming when higher ideals will govern o\u national education, when we shall understand that the object of education for both boys and girls is, as Milton says, "regaining to know God aright.