Education Materialistic, Says Lord Cobham

Press, Volume C, Issue 29511, 12 May 1961, Page 15

Education Materialistic, Says Lord Cobham

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON. May 11. •‘Our age is grossly materialistic, and can it be denied that our education is, too?” said the GovernorGeneral (Lord Cobham' addressing today’s annual conference of the New Zealand Educational Institute, an association representing 12,000 primary-school teachers. Lord Cobham said that, towards the turn of the last century. Samuel Butler said that dons were too busy educating young men to be able to teach them anything. ‘Now the wheel has turned, and under the goad of the examination system, the schoolteachers are too busy teaching the young people to be able to educate them,” Lord Cobham said.

"Are we not indeed teaching our children the shapes of letters and the tricks of numbers, and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic io roguery, and their literature to lust?” he asked. How else could be explained “the enormous sales of a dirty book by a halfinsane genius, and the plays which have for the last two years disgraced the London stage—plays whose domin. ating themes have been squalor, kitchen-sinks, and sexual perversion?” said Lord Cobham. There was some point in Mark Twain's satiric remark: • I have never let my schooling interfere with my educatin’.”

So many children were not “educated” at all, and wonder was that there were as many decent young people as there were, considering how little guidance many of them received. Lord Cobham said. Lord Cobham said he was

aware that the whole question of education in New Zealand waa at present under review, and that this was possibly “no moment for a heavy-footed amateur to express views which might embarrass the panel of ex. perts who are investigating the whole tortuous subject with so much patience.” But he suggested that it was time the fixed school-leaving age was reviewed “aU over the world.” Children should be able to leave school when it was found they tvere incapable .of learning any more, or hopelessly recalcitrant or non-co-operative. These “early leavers” could be usefully apprenticed to tradesmen, or sent to work on farms or in forests. He said: "Ideally, education is a cone-shaped affair, not a cylindrical one—and it is the top 20ft or so of the cone which will produce the real eminence, without which a country cannot flourish.”