RECONSTRUCTION

Dominion, Volume 12, Issue 181, 26 April 1919, Page 7

RECONSTRUCTION

THE CURSE AND CURE OF A

' RESETS SYSTEM

13y. F. 1,. Combs, M.A,

(For the "Dominion.") No. VII.

Tho soul that rises with ns on life's star Hath had elsewhere its setting And cometh from afar: Not in entire J'orgett'ulness, Ami not in utter nakedness, But. trailing clouds of glory do we come From God who is our home: Heaven lies about ns in our infancy! Shades of ihe prison-house begin to close Upon the growing boy. —"Ode to Immortality," Wordsworth.

"The truth is that inward and spiritual growth, even if it were thought desirable to produce it and measure it, could not possibly be measured. The real results of causation aro in the child's heart and mind and foul, beyond the reach of any measiiring-tope. or weighing-machine."--li. Holmes, H.I.M. Inspector of Schools, in "What. -Is and What Jlight Be" (A drastic condemnation of primary school routine, 7th impression.) "And tho Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living soul." — Genesis ii. 7 What a Child is. Every adult human' being is millions of vcars old. He is "the heir to all the ages, foremost in the' files' of time." Potentially at least he contains within himself germs of all that the human race has ever been. He is tho sum total of ages of accumulated instincts and tendencies. This conception, as marvellous as *t is true, fascinated the brilliant genius of I.afcadio Hearn. -He imagined the immemorial selves of a measureless past awakening one 'after another in the phycbic labyrinths of a' 6ingle personality. . Ghosts of bygone epochs rose to assert and to relinquish their predominance over the living body. The inner man was a multitudinous and murmuring confusion of forgotten voiccs. For just as physiologists assert that every cell out of the thousands of millions in the human body, has latent within it the capacity to reproduce and to duplicate the whole organism, so if the chords of,the human soul.be deftly struck can be re-aroused in a modern man ,the thousands of ancestral personalities of which his actual active being is a blend and .a composite. • Not, therefore, do we, ns Longfellow puts it, rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves to higher things. Rather is the immortal essences of former "beings," our own and our forefathers, interwoven with the weft and woof of our mortal existences.

Immortality and Education. - But what has such high doctrine to do with Education? Is it not a wilful intrusion of mysticism into a realm of commonseiwe-activity? Does not the ordinary light of an earthly day best reveal the eyident and reasonable possibilities of mind nurture iuid cultivation ?. ■No. lor education is first* a philosophy and only secondly a science—that is to say, it depends primarily for its point' of view on a complete conception of man and his nature and his mission on this globe only to a minor extent on that sketchy inquiry into and'analysis of faculty called psychology in our universities. U ere psychology the cue to even the aptitudes, let alone the full power of the human mind it would ;be possible to set lortli formulae of education the counterpart of Spon's engineering tables, and -to calcnlably operate a pupil in much the same way as wo do a steam engine. In other words, could we but i'roin external observation plot out the nature of the mind we could also externally impose rules'and exercises to bring about precisely that adjustment of-faculty to task - work which seems to be the ideal of modern State education. But as before stated education is a philosophy. It has to admit that it cannot solve the mystery of the origin or the destiny of a single living-soul—that (this is the. practical. point) no single personality comes under the control of its miiiistrants of..which they can securely eay, "This personality is made of such and such stuff and I will mould if- into such and such regulation patterns." Yet, is not this precisely what current examination systems- of eduation vainly endeavour to do? If not,, what else do their demands for uniform results from diverse personalities signify? The criminal fallacy of such procedure is, clearly recognised in the realm of physical education. Is'o one would, by a system of exercises coercively administered and passively submitted' to, dream of endeavouring to make tall.pupils short, tleshy pupils lean, burly pupils wiry. When we pass,, however, from body to ■mind, from physical ,lo psychic, we find the steepest of contrasts ignored. Temperaments, far as the Poles asunder, brains as diverse in their fertilised potentialities, as loam from clay, are brought under , identical rules (of thumb), treatment and expected to produce the same harvest and up to a certain minimum oven the same yield of capacities. No wonder that modern and gifted educational writers are beginning to experiene a repulsion from what is genetically described to-day as public education. For they realise that. a system which thus ignores .for the sake of obvious and ascertainable results the innate and immortal individuality of each child is a thwarting, not a working out, of all true ideals and development. They realise that it belongs to our living generation -to further and to fulfil, not to baffle and repress, the accumulated characteristics of tho immortal living soul placed under their care. I'ar from imposing by examination, as China has the pattern 30 centuries accepted, or as we do the pattern in vogue for the half of a'century upon this and all other souls placed under his care, the.educationist's task is to await and to divine the unfolding of that inner personality which comes to him fraught with the memories of its immemorial travail upon earth. He must see, not that, the immortal put on the mortality, of our own opportunist day and, generation, but rather • that there be withheld from it all such current, merely, temporal purposes as have no right or claim to batfle the eternal.

Teacher to : Minister not to Manage. The teacher's .role, as the Jtontcssori and its derivative systems indicate, is therefore to be skilfully. He is not lo obtrude "himself ami his ipso dixit, opon the child, but lo contrive materials and situations which will first provoke the desire for, then supply tho materials uf self-expression"- (i.e., self-education). I'or (nervo physiologists tell us tho same thing) there aro budding and flowering centres of i.'istinctive and nervous activity continually forming and opening in the growing personality. If thpso instincts aro born into tho light pf a congenial day, open, that is, to the eye of an appreciative and receptive adult world, skilful not to interfere, anxious and ingenious lo foster and lo encourage, they will I'nopagato into high and enduring powers <-f mind and spirit. If on the other hand they be slighted and ignored, then like a belated bloom they wilt wither and disappear without even Arriving at fruition. Summed np, all this means something both .simple and demonstrable. The child's mind (in other words his nervous sjslem) which resembles a tree, grows ji.st as does a. tree —grows, that is, in accordance with an impulse coming from within. Therefore, education cannot be imposed irom without. Ono might, just as reasonably adorn a living shrub with borrowed fruit and flowers, and expect to see them incorporate into itself and partako of ita vitality, as attach • one's own ideas and opinions lo a child's tnind, and expect to see them-strike bold and grow.

External Teaching Bestows Dead - Knowledge. Because this attempt is made—because as a really great educationist puts it, our ago "skims over the passive mind with film upon film of external information-," wo have all of lis a dead-weight of repugnant knowledge to carry round with us—knowledge which "stinks of tlm textbook." even as the I'hillipics smelt of tho lamp; knowledge distasteful in the obtaining, reluctantly elicited and void of application—in short, the average primary pupil's knowledge of history, geography, or. natural science, Under such a--regime of external instruction facts, I which ought automatically to transits

themselves into acts, aro mere matter of record. Incompletely learnt they aro incompletely lined. Had they been assimilated with tho full powers of mental digestion, had a ivatery-mouthod curiosity devoured them, a ravenous cerebrum integrated them, and these facts in brief entered a brain absorbed in absorbing them, they would iiavo become part of tho "thee" within old Omar's "me," a thee unlike his not blind. Instead they repelled, and were repelled by tho innermost 6oul of the learner. Their verbal casing was learnt perforce, impressed by much tucehanieal repetition upon his memory, this inner core of significance was ignored—and a Tomlinson, "an uuwimiowod stock of printed book," was produced. Everyone knows such men (Wells has one, a don in his "New Machiavelli"), their smooth flow of words, I heir sleek, well-groomed opinions, their ultra-modern equipment of cultured conversations. Approvers are they from the lips outward of all repul;-. nble things, but fa devoid integral force of character, of resolution, of cncrgetic principle as the bandar log they approximate. What You Know Is' Not What You Are. Their tragic malady is not hard to diagnose. They aro trye products of •an examination era. Knowledge in them is divorced from personality. They havo come to know without wanting to know for pure knowledge's sake. They have plastered themselves ever with a sUKico of intrinsic ami artificial information. The strong emotion of the soul bent upon eelf-realisation they have, never experienced. Tho supreme effort of a divine and immortal instinct to solve for itself the enigma that confronts it they'were never permitted to feel. Passive'repositories of second-hand wisdom they are, but the- animated lumber rooms of our civilisation—tho mandarins of tho West. Had our educational system concerned itself with profound and .obscure motions working their way from the innermost recesses of the individual up to his lips and . into his life, it might have achieved the completion of. the Creator's original intention, but. superficial, ocularly cognisable, 'numerically measurable results, the very results by which our schools to-<lay are appraised and standardised, would then have been lacking. v" God's Man v, the Classrooms, Suppose that the man of the Almighty's original intention were consummated out of the raw materials lie hands over to its, by our education process might he rot spell "irresistible" with only one "r," say "with you and I," and place Trafalgar after Waterloo in his erratic chronology? Would ho not of a certainty be left unplaced on tho scholarship list, having ignored for the sake of Self-know-lodge and Self-culture tho things his examiner knew and expected him and everyone elso to know? In short, being original, independent, developed in accordance with his own inner nature, would lie not rather flout and belie tho pattern mentality lurking in the minds of matriculation; university and board school in. spectors? One hopes that-he would, for in that possibility of an unexaminable diversity of minds lies the whole faith and trust of modern education—an education w;hich intends to set the newlyawakened soul free, subject to discreet and self-effacing guidance, to seek its own solution of the problems which it f-nd no one else can state, because though answered from without they are stated by a monitor, within.

An education'it will be of research, not of instruction, with tutors rather than teachers. Discovery, not exposition, will be its key-word. Self-realisation end self-control, not self-submission and pervile obedience, will be its goals. Taking over from the.genesis of tilings, as the Church once did. the living soul with its inscrutable spark of the divine, it will endeavour to make the mysteries of its orifrin a forecast of the mysteries of its destinv. Instead of placing what is immortal in its offspring in bondage to tlio spirit of an age devoid of cosmic perspectives, it will seek oven, as its own Master Spirit sought the clue to heavens unopened in the mind and heart of the child.

Note.—Tie cell reproduction, curious cases of "dermoid cvsts" in surgery. ' A swelling on the eyebrow being opened by the. surgeon's knife has revealed miniature rudimentary jaws and teeth.