CONTINUATION OR HIGH! SCHOOL?

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 110, 3 February 1919, Page 6

CONTINUATION OR HIGH! SCHOOL?

"LEARN FOR LIFE AND NOT FOR SCHOOL "-SENECA SHOULD 16 BE THE LEAVING AGE? (Fof The Dominion.) (By F. L. Combs, M.A.) The young Athenian was kept in hand till he was of age. But in those >days there was a liberal education deserving of the name. It both partook of and passed into the life of the community. Artificial or Vital Education? The ideas and feelings which coloured the consciousness of the scholar assimilated him to the highly speculative, agile, and polished intercourse of the gentry of the day. His education in polite and manly accomplishments was adapted without i\ forethought to his place in society and among tho nation's institutions. The notion that education could bo one thing carried on under factory conditions and turning out a factory product—that, real life might be quite another, finding the utmost difficulty in making over this product to; the purposes of tho times, never seems to have occurred to j tho Greek of the Golden Age. ; It was left for China and ourselves, j per medium of entrance and leaving ex-1 animations,, to make education turn its I back upon vital function; to elevate; docile instruction into the prime posi-1 tion in the school regimen; to (est the scholar by his absent-minded abstraction from the affairs of his ImirKi and i the market. (Will those who dislike the Chinese parallel search for anything in the examination system of Far Cathay more lunibersome and archaic than matriculation Latin ? ■ What Tom Tulliver thought of it all 100 years ago is equally true for the mass of boys to-day.) The Dead Formalism of the School. Some philosophers call current svst'ems eclectic—eclectically artificial would be a truer designation. There seems to bo a vicious trick of the pedagogical mind by which every subject from philology to bilk of parcels assumes a formal and forbidding aspect, stiffening into a< sapless pedantry. Is it a tradition of tho ferule, a relic of the "heavy-handed bar-ber-surgery of the mind"? Is it because one cannot stow or bestow instruction without assuming a detached attitu.io to it? Certain it is the vital currents of intercourse, whether in stini. ulus or response, run.slow and sullen in tho school. Its good boy, its Al output, is despised as a prig—vido George Bas. sett _ ("Penrod") and Tulko ("Stalky and Co."). The Bocial outcome of the school's formal instruction drives our Dickenses out of inn parlours and our deprecatory Lambs off tne tops of buses. For there Is oven in conversation a feeling of resentment when tags of schoolboy knowledge about isotherms and Henry VIII's divorces are forced upon the listener. "For. he.-iven's sake," wo feel inclined to say to the unprepossessing compendiuni of scholarship information, "for heaven's sr-ke be natural. Tell us something you have found out for your self by,pulsating oont.net with real men and women in the wicked world outside school." Kipling's devil puts it very neatly: "And tho good you took from a printed - book Be with you Tomlinson," The Remedy for This, Artificiality. These thoughts were all in the writer's mind when called upon to vote for the raising. of the school age to sixteen. Though a pig-headed believer in education, according to his own definition—the action and reaction of personality on personality—that copulation of spirit with spirit, compared with which the love affairs of chemical atoms are child's play to the investigator—though one who lias promulgated education as the veritable battle-cry against the ene-. mies of our civilisation, he voted against any, such raising of the compulsory age. He held that we are not prepared for it. Tho instruction habit of the school is still too strong upon it. Minds attained to and past their prime in this regimen of formal knowledge dominate and direct it. As ' well endeavour to reform, the idiosyncrasies of a grandfather by a shock from a dynamo as by legislative or O. in C. fiat to alter peremptorily the outlook and tendency of the schools'. Set Youth Free. Indeed, instead of keeping our youth in our schools till sixteen, the writer, though a parent, •in dally and active exercise of his functions, would chooso rather to send them away from it at eleven—for a'time. The straining at the pedogogical leash, the desire to abandon deoimals for a stockwhip or a spanner, which occurs circa twelve years old, cannot nowadays ,be rogarded as original sin. It is the healthy egoism of the desk-pent-human being seeking a realism unknown to the tomb-like silences of the factory processes of class instruction. May a proof be cited? Take those universal boys, Penrod, Tom Sawyer, and Dan ("Little Men"). Where were they educated? Surely in a grossly improper but completely engrossing underworld of stablo, copse, and cave, amid obscenities and profanities, and evil, boon companions (Herman, Vernian, and Huck Finn), whose discovery to the light of a village day would have caused a turmoil of outraged gossip on the part of their elders. What isvthe unevadable deduction? The biological, tho vital, the developmental education of a boy goes on furtively in secluded groves and back alleys. The more ostentatious processes of the school supply but facilities and abilities accessory to the captivating preoccupations of an unobtrusive leisure. Culture? But How? The writer agrees with those who argue that our manual workers; our mechanics, nnd tradesmen require for the alleviation iof their monotonous task work a higher culture. Having heaved a little gravel, he would concede Greek plays to the gravel-heaver. The agriculturist and harvest hand have a better right than the 'drawing-room miss to Wordsworth's poetry. (In Scotland Burns is appreciated and applied as he ought to be to the needs of just such people.) He demurs, however; to the suggestion that the youth—far more insurgent against the monotonous routine of the classroom than the tram conductor against that of his city route-should be detained and constrained to his desk yet two Years longer. What, then, is the solution of this cul.tural problem? Undoubtedly, it is the continuation school. Taking the youth for three months per annum, it oau, once it has freed its curriculum from the dead hand of a Board School past, interweave with tho garnered human nnd practical interests of a nine months in field, factory, or shop the penetrating comments of our great authors, the constructive suggestions cf modern science. ■ Sandwich Plan for the Future. The education of the future is, in short, going to be on the sandwich plan'. Real life and school life will bo interleaved. The former will provide the commentary, tho latter the illustration. As early as 10 or 11, in addition to sharing the occupations of the home and the backyard, the child will be given periods, brief at first, of actual participation in tho work of a world of men.

Can all this be too confidently assert ed? Hardly. The advanced school of American educational thinkers are seeking in the social and the solution of the problems of a vital instruction. They aro not i-ontent, as was our generation, with "visits to" the gnsworks and tho creamery. They are incorporating into the training of littlo men the labours nnd delights of full, grown ones.

Is it the way? Watch a boy doing dictation or square root. Catch later on tho same boy driving a baker's cart or, unduly condemned occupation, selling evening papers.