The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 1916. A WORD IN SEASON

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XLIII, Issue 1, 6 January 1916, Page 33

The New Zealand Tablet THURSDAY, JANUARY 6, 1916. A WORD IN SEASON

TIE present season of the year is in more |j{il senses than one the children’s season. It {I jL* . .is theirs because of the Christ-child Whose J coming is being celebrated, and Whose ineffable beauty surrounds all childhood ... with a halo. It is theirs, too, because X r*-' in these southern lands Christmas brings 'v'V the end of the school year with its exam- |- - inations and rewards, and these become the :, almost universal subject of conversation in the household, -and their eulogy occupies very largely the public press. - The heads of our Catholic’ schools and

the members of public school boards and local com-mittees-have been busy making speeches, and no chronicle of the greatest war the world has seen has been able to crowd their report from the pages of the daily paper. . These speeches contain a great deal of sense, but as usual some nonsense is found intermingled with it. We have noticed once again in many of our country exchanges how emphasis has been laid upon the advantages the present day affords to school children. For such emphasis in itself we have, of course, only praise; but when the eulogisers go on to say that the particular advantage of the present day lies in the ease with which knowledge may be acquired, we begin to rub our eyes and ask ourselves if we have not in some dream misread the processes of education and grossly exaggerated the toiling of those who have been the scholars of their several generations.

The three greatest poets of all time lived in days when the acquiring of knowledge was a hard labor. We are convinced that in this respect our boasting of a favored age is all in vain; and we are convinced, too, that our system of education in New Zealand is wrong in so far as it is based upon the facility which the age affords of acquiring without corresponding labor a knowledge of a multiplicity of facts. Knowledge, like most things else, is worth what it costs, and in its markets labor is the current coin. In the days of great light and learning the student was a patient and industrious delver; but to-day, at least in this country where the regulations are dispensing more and more with home work, the teacher has to spread out knowledge before the eyes of the pupil instead of making him acquire it mainly by his own industry. It has been well said that ‘ discipline distinguishes human beings from the lower animals,’ but it must never be forgotten that labor is the most potent discipline of life. Let our school children, therefore, rather dread the facilities of the day, and be taught to set little value upon what may be purchased at too cheap a price. Let them have all their best efforts directed against the temper of the time, and, ‘ut quocunque paratus ’ —family motto of an Irish nobleman— a heart for any fate, let them seek the secrets of learning in hard labor and stress. °

Our editors know too much and write too much:; it were better 'that they knew less, or, knowing more, confined themselves to a few topics, and allowed their readers to delve and mine for themselves in the rich fields and quarries of learning. , Even our preachers, salv'a reverentia, may easily err in this respect. It may well be that they talk too much and do not afford sufficient time to their-people to think and meditate upon what has been said. But the temper of the time is against thought and meditation; men seem to be afraid to think, and the organ must peal and the choir sing before the preacher has left the pulpit, lest between sermon and Benediction there should be any little interval for thought. The cinematograph has come to show us in an hour more than many a scholar could garner by his own efforts in a year, and the unthinking hail it as an educator, and the advertising sheet acclaims it to the wings of the wind; but a year’s patient industry would make a more cultured - man. We saw one evening lately the whole process of honeymaking spread out before us at the picture show; but it was at no picture show that a great Belgian naturalist learned the secrets of the life of the bee; (nor would secrets learned thus afford the delights that thousands and. tens of thousands have drawn from his charming pages). We have seen gardens, too, in the show, but real delight in flowers; comes only from , personal observation, patient study, and devoted culture. The gardener who tours his garden with Alphonse Carr as v guide could never love the touring pictures no matter how rich and wonderful and, astonishing the colors.. The time may come when. the ascent of Egmont or Mount Cook may be made by means of a lift,, but the use of a lift will never bring about that

robust health and those sweet delights that reward the sturdy climber. The processes of real -education must be slow, patient, and largely personal; and the last ruin of education will be complete • when it will be all teaching and no learning. Power and activity come after labor, but the boy for whom the teacher does the thinking will never grow into a man of power, for growth has its processes which will brook no interference. An educator then is not one who supplies information but one who supplies a stimulus to personal effort after knowledge. A boy may fail in every school examination, but if he can read and write and has a taste for books his feet are on the high road to knowledge, and he will become an educated man. The Minister for Education complained the other day, and rightly, that reading, writing, and composition, were neglected •in our schools. We will return to this another day, but for the present we merely say that the chief reason lor the defect lies in what we have been saying. The temper of the age is against effort, and, as De Quincey says : ‘lt is more even by the effort, and tension of mind required, than by the mere loss of time, that most readers are repelled from the habit of careful reading.’ *

We are glad to know that we have thousands of boys amongst our Catholic readers; we would impress on these the duty of striving by every possible effort to become educated men. They owe this duty to themselves, to their parents, and to the priests and Brothers and nuns who are making such sacrifices in their behalf. Each Catholic is an individual cell in the mystic Body of Christ, which is the Church, and the higher the life of each cell the nobler the life of the whole body will be. The life of a city is the life of the citizens. As the water tower in one of our North Island towns raised the water level, the merchants were induced to put up more stately buildings, if not quite so high as the tower itself, at least higher than the dwarfed shops that had in their obscurity hugged the ground. Thus let each Catholic labor to know, that he may lift the level of all. To study for self improvement or self amusement is a form of self-indulgence, just as eating or drinking may be. One may, of course,’ writes the author of Ekkehard, ‘play, the miser with scientific lore just as with gold, and he who scrapes and gathers for the mere pleasure of having, all forgetful that his possessions should be turned to account, benefits neither himself nor any one else.’