EASY COURSES IN EDUCATION

Hokitika Guardian, 18 June 1929, Page 2

EASY COURSES IN EDUCATION

A. Lawrence Lowell, president of Harvard University, speaking before the Massachusetts School-masters’ Club in .Boston, took a stand against some modern trends in education, especially the custom of allowing students too much “self-expression’’ latitude in choosing their own courses of study (says the “Christian Science Monitor”). Agreeing that it was impossible to educate anyone against his own will, President Lowell contended that the individual gets out of education approximately what he put into it. “We hear”, he said, “a great deal of ‘Let the boy do what he wants’. The trouble with, that is the boy isn’t incrested in any general subject. Then, according to that idea, and to be logical, we must ‘let him’ do nothing at all .because that is what he is best fitted for! Unfortunately that is just what we sometimes do. The moral I want to draw is this: Interest is not ‘normal’ in the human beimr. No one is born with interest. The only interest we are born with is the desire for food. Every other interest is artificial and the result of stimulation. Hence if we wish youth to profit by going to college, we cannot simply place before him an array of, to us. inviting or profitable subjects to be studied, and expect serenely that he will do the rest. Unless we can flag his interest lie can lie tnmrht and taught and taiurht and it will profit him nothing at all.

“The tiling I have learned, and indeed the idea with which 1 started many years ago, as that all education is primarily a moral problem : I mean in the French sense of ‘morale’; it isn’t so much what we learn but voij much what might be called the ‘appetite’ for intellectual thinrrs. Whatever you do to quicken the appetite for intellectual things, to make men realise that working hard is worth while, vou can turn their energy and interest into any direction you desire. Teach-them that working hard for intellectual grasp is worth while.”