LOVE OF LEARNING.

Akaroa Mail and Banks Peninsula Advertiser, Volume I, Issue 77, 13 April 1877, Page 3

LOVE OF LEARNING.

" One great defect in systems of school education is the lack of proper stimulus to the pupil. Abundant inducements are held out. The child daily hears of the value of education ; is told how men get rich and happy by it, and how they are degraded and worthless without it. Ambition is appealed to, and vanity is cultivated by rewards, prizes, and school honours, and sharp words and stinging lashes are added, to push the unwilling laggards forward up the hill of science. Considerable knowledge is imparted under this treatment. Pupils progress with perhaps a fair understanding of the branches necessary for the ordinary transactions of life ; but how many leave school with a love for learning, a thirst to know more, a determination to go on improving ? On the contrary, it is not to the average boy like closing a prison door behind him, and emerging into liberty when he leaves the school-room, and enters the office or the counting-house. In after years be may lament wasted opportunities, and as he discovers the commercial value of education, he may regret not having remained longer a pupil, that he might be better fitted for his work, but he has no real love for books, no aspiration for higher culture for its own sake.

This need not be. A child is naturally eager to learn. His ten thousand questions are the torment of an unappreciative or unskilful parents. If from the first he were taught how to find answers to bis

questions from observation and from books' and his curiosity be kept aroused and properly directed, instead of being persistently snubbed down, he would need no promise of " good marks or medals or prizes to make him studious. At school he is set to tasks in which he can have little interest. What does he care whether the equator runs north and south or east and west; or what are the boundaries of Katnscbatka; or who was the third King of the Egyptians ? Let him begin work at a point where his interest is awakened, and he desires to know more of the subject; then lead bun by short steps to enlarge his field of enquiry; and his faculties will be sharpened. The actual sum of knowledge gained at school is as nothing compared with the value of a love of learning implanted and a proper guidance given to the sources where information may be gained. Under such treatment it will soon matter little whether be remain in the school-room or not. The springs have been set in motion which will not let him rest; a healthful appetite sharpened, which he will seek to gratify, and for which there are abundant supplies. Not the mere successful winner of prizes, who has ambitiously led his class, but the lover of learniug becomes the leader of thought.