GOVERNOR DU CANE ON EDUCATION.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 126, 26 October 1874, Page 3

GOVERNOR DU CANE ON EDUCATION.

At the annual meeting of the Tasmanian Council of Education, held at Hobart Town, a farewell address was presented to his Excellency Mr Du Cane, Governor of Tasmania, who is about to return to the mother country. His Excellency, in his reply, entered somewhat at length into the educational question. We are indebted to the Hobart Town Mercury for the following report of the proceedings . His Excellency said—l have to express, as best I may, my very sincere appreciation of the graceful compliment which your Council of Education has paid to me in presenting this address, and in selecting this occasion to present it before this large representative assemblage of the Tasmanian people. That I have deserved such a special compliment I do not pretend. I can only say that, so endorsed, I conld not have received at the close of my connection with this colony any testimonial in any possible way more gratifying to my feelings, [Applause.] I can but say, and I say it emphatically, that the interest which I have endeavoured to show in the cause of your educational progress has come from my heart, and has not been shown merely from a sense of any obligation arising out of my official position. [Applause.] The powers of a constitutional Governor are, as we all know, somewhat circumscribed, but the man must be cold-hearted indeed who could occupy for six years the position I have done, and find nothing during that time either to engage his attention or attract his sympathies. I can, I think, conscientiously say that I have availed myself of every opportunity which I thought a legitimate one, to show my sympathy with the varying fortunes, the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears of this young community, and to assist it in its onward progress to what, I trust, may be a national manhood of vigour and prosperity. And it is because 1 believe that the greater the number any country possesses of cultivated citizens, of men and women of education, refinement, and character, the better the prospect of its manhood being really vigorous and prosperous ; it is for that reason that, I have watched, with a special interest, from year to year, the proceedings which are so fitly close' by the great gathering in this hall. [Applause.] And here, so far as a direct reply to the address presented to me is concerned, I might fittingly resume my seat. But I believe that, as this is the last time I shall be present amongst you on this anniversary, it will not be deemed inappropriate if I add to the mere formal acknowledgment of the address some remarks on the edu ation question generally, and your own system of superior education in particular. But before I say a word on either of those subjects, let me express what I am sure will be the general feeling of deep regret that this anniversary has been marked by the very serious illness of a member of the council, whose name has been certainly longer, if not more prominently, identified than any other in this colony with tne higher education of its rising generation. Speaking as I do, in the midst of those friends among whom he has lived and laboured for so many years past.and many of whom both owe to him their early training and can testify to its soundness, it is not for me to dilate on the good services which my friend Mr Buckland has rendered to your educational cause. Suffice it to say, that to that cause he has earnestly and indefatigably given the best years of his life, and in that cause he has now fallen, like a good soldier, at his post, almost before the cheers had well died away which greeted thewell-deserved triumph of his son. [Loud applause.] I am sure that all will join in their congratulations upon that victory, and in a unanimous wish that by God’s blessing the father may recover his health, and live many years yet to see his son’s career crowned with fresh educational laurels. But passing on to the merits of your own system in particular, I can only say this, as a thoroughly disinterested observer, that if T thought, as some say, that your scholarships merely served to advertise in England the educational liberality of Tasmania, as a dead loss to the colony of so much intellect as may have been exerted to attain them, 1 should be the first to join in the cry of away with them as a useless and expensive luxury. If I thought, too that your whole system is one which, as I have seen it described, withholds the bread of instruction from the poor in order that the rich may enjoy intellectual refinements and dainties, I should say at once the sooner such a system is entirely remodelled the better. But none, to my mind, but the wilfully blind can shut their eyes to the fact that the scholars you have sent forth are gradually returning to you. Nor can it be ignored that, while each year brings a larger number ot candidates for the A. A. degree, the most sue-

cessful, as a rule, have been anything but the sons of those who can afford to pay for intellectual dainties. [Applause.] 1 have seen a large proportion of your first class, at all events, composed of youths who have worked their way up from your common schools, and who in all probability, never would have done so without the aid which your system has afforded them. And the result of this annually increasing competition for scholarships and degrees must act on the general teaching power of the colony, as well as on those who are taught, and so far, to my mind, from keeping the bread of instruction from the poor, it will give the poor a more liberal supply of bread of a better quality, and increase their chances of rising also to the good things at the top of the ladder. Even if your scholars only come back to take partin tuition, it is a great point gained, and they will more than repay their country the assistance it has given them. But why are they not in time to stock your learned and scientific professions, and why are they not in time also to take their fair part in the active public life of the colony? I know it is sometimes said that English public life is not colonial public life, and that colonial public life requires no special training whatever, but the exercise of the very commonest of common sense. Whenever I hear or read anything to that effect, I always think of a passage in the writings of Archbishop Whately : —“ While the pedantry of learning and science has often been dwelt upon, and deservedly ridiculed, there is another danger on the opposite side, which is rarely, if ever, mentioned ; yet it is a folly quite as great as the other; of a yet more intolerable character and still more hopeless—l mean what may be called‘the pedantry of common sense and experience.’ ” For one person who is overbearing you on account of his knowledge of technical terms, you will find five or six still more provokingly impertinent with their common sense and experience. “ What has political economy” say they, for example, “got to do with such simple matters as taxation, the education of the people, the national debt, and so forth. We want only common sense and experience.” But their common sense will be found to be nothing more than common prejudice, and their experience will be found to consist in the fact that they have done a thing wrong very often, and fancy they have done it right. In former times men knew by experience that the earth stands stiil, and the sun rises and sets. Common sense taught them that there could be no antipodes, since men could not stand or walk with their heads downwards like flies on the ceiling. Experience taught the King of Bantam that water could not become solid. And the experience and common sense of one of the most observant and intelligent of historians, Tacitus, convinced him that for a mixed government to be so framed as to combine the elements of royalty, aristocracy, and democracy must be next to impossible, and that if such a one were framed it must inevitably be very speedily dissolved. But then it is said, granted that colonial public life requires training as much as English, it must be training of a different sort, and however well the curriculum of an English university may suit the one, it is unsuited to the other. I know that it is very difficult to disabuse people’s minds of the idea that our great English universaries are, even now-a-days, nothing more than what Mr Bright once called them, “The home of dead languages and undying prejudices;” and that in the new Museum of Oxford, or the Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge, natural science, in all its branches, may be studied in the most practical form. But I suppose it will be at least admitted that the training which suits men for the public life of one Australasian colony will most probably suit them for that of another ; and here, perhaps, I may be allowed to adduce a case in point. When I was travelling in New Zealand a few months since, I found that of the ten members which the province of Canterbury seat to the central Parliament of the colony, six had been educated at Oxford and Cambridge, and as the Superintendent of the province, himself also a University man, told me, were amongst the most useful and practical members of the House. Depend upon it that if, as these colonies harden from the gristle into the bone and sinew of manhood, they are to be anything but a strange motley chaos of struggling democracy—there must be training of iome kind for your public men. And depend upon it further, that the strongest thread in the tie which binds the children to the mother country is not the kinship of race alone, but the similarity of training, manners, and institutions. [Applause.] One point further in dealing with this part of the subject will, I venture to urge, and ic is embodied in a single sentence which I found the other day in a leading article in the Times, Speaking of the debate on the Education Estimates in the House of Commons, the Times says :—“ The example of all the world that desires to be called civilised, foremost in it our own colonial progeny, leaves us no choice but to force education to as high a point as can be reached, and upon as many as can be included.” There is my point, not the best education merely, but the best education to the greatest numbers. From common school to scholarships let your scheme be a really symmetrical whole, and in your zeal for superior education never neglect the paramount obligations of primary instruction. [Applause] But if I pass from the framework of your system to the educational programme which the superior portion of it offers, and the question of what is or what is not a liberal education, I confess, as many abler men have done before me, my utter inability to prescribe an educational programme which shall suit all intellects alike, or upon which can be stamped the seal of infallability. I myself, as I think you all must know, was brought up in the old classical and mathematical groove, and I am educational Tory enough still to maintain that nothing is better than that old groove for forming style, giving a man accuracy of thought and expression, and training the reasoning powers for the subsequent pursuit of science and of general intellectual culture. But I do not for one moment pretend to say that this old groove is infallible, or that the intellectual powers cannot be developed and habits of accuracy and close reasoning acquired under any other system of training. The great contest appears now-a-days to be between the upholders of classics and the advocates of natural science, and doubtless the history of the world is full of instances of great men, great kings, great warriors, statesmen, or men of science, whose knowledge of Latin and Greek was of the most limited character. But then again, on the other hand, the same history will give ns equally numerous illustrations of how a man may be a great man iu many senses of the word without even a rudimentary knowledge of the facts

of natural science. For instance, iu a memoir of that elegant scholar and great friend of Mr Canning, Mr John Hookham Frere, by his nephew, the present Sir Bartle Frere, the nephew records the following anecdote in point, told him by his uncle, of the great English statesman :—“I remember one day, said Mr Frere, going to consult Canning on a matter of great importance to me, when he was staying near Enfield. We walked into the woods to have a quiet talk, and as we passed some ponds I was surprised to find that it was a new light to him that tadpoles turned into frogs.” [Laughter.] My uncle added, “ Now, don’t you go and tell that story about Canning to the next fool you meet. Canning could rule, and did rule, a great Jand civilised nation ; but in these days people are apt to fancy that anyone who does not know the natural history of frogs must be an imbecile in the treatment of men.” [Laughter.] Now, in resuscitating this anecdote of the great English statesman and orator, I by no means wish to disparage the study of natural or any other science. I quote the story merely to strengthen my position, that you cannot prescribe one course of iraining warranted to turn out all men polished to the same pitch of intellectual cultivation. I would even say further, that I fear there are many things the majority of cultivated men must each, in his own sphere, be content to remain in ignorance of. But I myself endorse cordially the position taken with regard to the whole question of a liberal education by that most accomplished of classical scholars, the late Professor Conington. “My belief,” he says, “is, that what we want is not the substitution of one theory of liberal education for another, but an arrangement by which different theories shall be allowed to subsist side by side. The prejudice of which we require to be disabused is not faith in classics as an exclusive training, but faith in any training whatever, as exclusive. It is the growth of free opinion, which is undermining the supremacy of the present system; it it is only by the suppression of free opinion that any other system, claiming to be universal can be established.” And it is this view which I think the educational programme of the Tasmanian Council very fairly endeavors to recognise. In fact, I should say thtt those who have had charge of the programme have dealt with it in a spirit of fair compromise between the old and new lights on the educational question. I should say that they have endeavored both to frame it originally, and to amend it from time to time —

“Not clinging to some ancient saw, Nor mastered by some modern term, Nor swift nor slow to change, but firm And in its season brought the law.” For while it certainly attaches great, but by no means undeserved, weight to classical and mathematical culture, natural science and modern languages have fair places assigned to them, and no one can say that our own language is sent into the background. But I must point out, in reference to the science portion of the programme, that the results of the examination in such subjects in Tasmania appear to be very analogous on a small scale to those in England, and I think that you must be prepared for some time to come to find them more or less disappointing as compared with those in classics or mathematics. The fact is pretty evident in England that that method of teaching which has been brought to such perfection by the practice of some centuries with respect to classics or mathematics, has yet to be learnt with respect to science. In the reports of the local examinations for 1873, held by the University of Cambridge, some rather pertinent statements appear on this point. In those examinations no less than 3550 male and female candidates were examined, and I may remark in passing, that the young ladies in some instances did decidedly better than the young gentlemen, and appeared, in most cases at least, to be able to hold their own with them. But the least satisfactory of all the reports were those of the examiners in natural science. In chemistry, heat, &c, the seniors, with very few exceptions, “ did very badly;” in geology “ there is very great room for improvement;” in zoology “about half the candidates failed even to pass;” and in botany, “several of the junior students were quite unprepared to pass even the simplest examination.” And the examiners gave it as their opinion “that the art of teaching these subjects is at present most imperfectly understood, and it will be some time before they lake an effective place in education.” If this is the case in England, you must not be discouraged if the science portion of your programme proves for some time yet to come a comparative failure in Tasmania, especially when it has to be handicapped with classics and mathematics. And this leads me to say a few words on what I consider to be an undoubted danger ahead of your programme as at present constituted —its possible tendency to encourage cramming in a variety of subjects at the expense of fulness and accuracy in any one of them. [Applause.] It is one thing, as at English Universities, to have various separate examination schools of classics, mathematics, law, and modern history, natural science, and so forth, for each one of which there is a separate class list, and in each of which a candidate can take separate honors ; and it is another to have an examination programme embracing u variety of subjects, the highest honors in which are not unfrequently carried off by a candidate who gets to the head of the poll simply by taking up one or two more subjects than his fellows, and scoring little more than the minimum number which entitles him to claim any marks at all for those subjects. The one system encourages excellence and thoroughness in one or two subjects at most, the other encourages a superficial knowledge of several. The one is the system of the English universities, the other is that of the civil service competitive examinations ; and as to how that system is working in England, I recommend to the careful study of every member of the council an article which appeared on competitive examinations in the Edinburgh Review of April last. They will see that that sy-tem is having a bad effect on the class of men that enter the civil service, that it has engendered an increasing tendency to superficiality, and that under its auspices has arisen a race of professional crammers, who have brought to perfection the art of training their pupils not to acquire special excellence in any one subject, but to distribute their time iu view to obtaining the greatest number of aggregate marks by moderate proficiency in several. And this tendency to superficiality is especially noticeable in tlie case of natural science, which, it is said, is a subject invariably left to be got up at the last, after the ground has been made safe in other lines.

‘Naturals,’’ to use the slang in vogue at these establishments, pay better than anything else to get up in a hurry Now, this is a danger which, with nine subjects already on the programme, I certainly do see looming ahead for your Tasmanian system, and it is one which your council would do well to seriously consider. Whether it can be best met by something like the English University system of schools, and, while offering the choice of a variety ot subjects to all candidates, limiting the number which will be necessary for a degreein any one school, 1 will not now* detain you by arguing—l do but point out the possible rock or shoal ahead. It is for the council, if they think there is anything in my warning, to consider what is the best mode of preventing their ship from being wrecked upon it, Ido not suppose, however, that the council will be inclihed to adopt the remedy against cramming recently suggested by a great educational authority, who proposed that all candidates presenting themselves for competitive examination should on a given day be shipped on board a given ship, and having been sent on a cruise for three months, and carefully deprived during that time of all access to books, pens, ink, or paper, should immediately on thdr return to port have their examinations laid before them. [Laughter.] No doubt a sea voyage under such circumstances might be extremely agreeable for the candidates, no doubt it might enable them to—- “ Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow, Baze out the written troubles of the brain— And with some sweet oblivious antidote Cleanse the stuff’d bosom of that perilous stuff Which weighs upon the heart.” But I fear, if there is truth in the Edinburgh Review, the examiner in natural science before whom they came on their return might possibly find himself “ For the book of knowledge fair, Presented with a universal blank

Of Nature’s works to them expunged and razed, And wisdom at one entrance quite shut out.” But your successful candidates for the A.A. degree have, at all events, been put to no such test, and though your successful scholars have soon got their sea-voyage to come, as I also, alas ! have mine, I hope that during that voyage we shall neither of us forget the mutual lessons we have acquired in Tasmania. No one ought to pass six years in the position I have held without adding largely to his stock of experience, and most happy shall I be if in time to come I can ever turn that gathered experience to your service. [Applause.] But while my experience may after all profit you but little, on the lessons which your rising generation, male and female, are learning, depend the future fortunes of the entire colony. To the successful candidates, then, of both sexes, I offer my sincere and hearty congratulations, but here, for your benefit, I am going to call up a very peculiar spirit of mine. Let me beg of you to remember that so far from having this day finished your education, yen have only laid the foundation on which to rear the structure, and that that structure is one which even a long, active, and well employed life will leave incomplete at its close. Be sure of this, that the longer you live and the more you cultivate and develope your intellectual powers, the more will you realise the correctness of the saying that the utmost knowledge a man can attain to is but a little learning in comparison with that of which he must remain in ignorance. The view is like that of an American forest, in which the more trees a man cuts down, the greater is the expanse of wood which he sees beyond him. Beware then of the fallacy of a finished education, for false at all times, at the outset especially of the grert battle of practical life I do not know a more specious or mischievous delusion. Practical life has been recently defined to be a sum in which your duty, multiplied by your capacity, and divided by your circumstances, gives the fourth term to the proposition, which is your deserts, with great accuracy. As you persevere, then, steadfastly in the path of duty, and enlarge your capacity by intellectual culture, the more energetically you practice those habits of earnestness, accuracy, perseverance, and thoroughness, which have so often formed the text of my little educational sermons, the larger evidently becomes the capital of your stock-in-trade, and the greater the dividends which you may hope to receive. But standing as Ido here for the last time to address a Tasmanian audience on education, I must also add that greater and richer by far wiil be your dividend if you steadily resolve that your intellectual and moral culture snail go hand in hand. [Applause.] Make that resolution, and keep steadfast to it now in the bright and golden sunshine of youth; and let me, as one for whom all the freshness of that early sunshine is past, remind you that “Youth waneth by increasing.

Beauty, strength, youth, are flowers, but fading seen;

Duty, faith, love, are roots, and are for ever green.” Culture, it has been well said, is “to know the best that has been said and thought in the world,” while “ conduct is to turn that knowledge to the best, the most moral, the most righteous account,” and conduct and culture together make up the great sum total of human life and action. In this partnership conduct owns three-fourths of the capital, for culture without conduct is after all but knowledge of the head. But the union of conduct and culture means knowledge of the head combined with that of the heart; it means that knowledge which has power over life and death, over the body and the soul, and in that knowledge and that union is to be found the only sure sign of the progress of nations, the very heart’s core itself of civilisation. I say, then, let the rising generation of Tasmania inscribe on their banners the union of “conduct and culture,” and let them go forth under that banner manfully and truthfully to fight the great battle of practical life. In that battle they may fail as others have done before them, for the race, as we know, is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong. But failure in such a cause faithfully fought for will at least bring with it no dishonour, and they will be saved from the reproach of that aimless, hopeless, unprofitable existence, which is worse than an early death. And if they succeed, then perchance in the good time to eome, when the memory of my governorship is beginning to wax dim, it may be their lot truthfully to claim for themselves in the best, the noblest, the purest, the most Christian sense of the words, the proud boast of the Athenian statesman and general, “That he had made a small state great.” His Excellency resumed his seat amid loud and continued applause,