DAY BY DAY.

Waikato Times, Volume 90, Issue 14024, 29 March 1919, Page 6

DAY BY DAY.

“We come out of this war with a clearer view of what is The Value essential in education," of said Mr G. E. Blanch, Languages, headmaster of Christ’s College, Christchurch, at the prize-giving ceremony. “The voices which proclaimed that our, public school system was useless, or worse, are silenced. The world has more respect than ever for schools of this type which do not permit commercialism to oust the wisdom of the ages or to close and seal the hooks which tell us of the efforts of the great men of the Greek and Roman republics to found and maintain democratic government. A member of the University Senate now sitting in Christchurch said to me the other day, ‘Greek is dead.' ‘Not in Christ’s College,’ I replied. The struggles for existence among school subjects is strenuous now that so many of them claim a place in the school curriculum, but I believe that at this college there will always be some boys ‘fit, though few,’ who will wish to learn Greek, and so have the key to one of ttie greatest of the older civilisations. “With regard to the vexed subject of Latin,” Mr Blanch proceeded, “for a liberal education every boy should give one or two years to Latin, because he thus gets the best insight into the elementary structure of language. In most medical schools I believe that the student begins the subject of human anatomy by studying a skeleton. In the same way the organic structure of language can best be learned through Latin, which, because of its very meagre vocabulary, is only a skeleton language when compared with English.