The Manawatu Standard (PUBLISHED DAILY.) The Oldest Daily Newspaper on the West Coast. WEDNESDAY, MAY 20. 1885. OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM.

Manawatu Standard, Volume IX, Issue 141, 20 May 1885, Page 2

Manawatu Standard (PUBLISHED DAILY.) The Oldest Daily Newspaper on the West Coast. WEDNESDAY, MAY 20. 1885. OUR EDUCATION SYSTEM.

We make the Following Extracts from an excellent article upon the Educational System of Great Britain m the Dunfermline Prese. It is singularly applicable to. -educational matters m this colony: — There is one thing that has been suggested to us by the opinions expressed upon our educational system, that so far as we are aware has not been discussed to a very great extent — viz., the disappearance of the old-time schoolmaster from among us, and the appearance m his stead of men who may be fitly regarded as machines. With all his defects of method and deficiencies of learning, the old schoolmaster was not a machine, and we are afraid his successor m these times is fast drifting into this unenviable condition. Now-a-days we have teachers of this, that and the other particular branch of educational curriculum., Bu| that is not" all. We have teachers »f degrees, of grades— mcii who bring a pupil ( of whatever capabilities) up to a certain point m a subject, and then pass him on to the cramming agent. Our schools and school mas* ters labor under an excess of system • atization, and the high regard paid to the quantitive results of education is including a kind of machine work that effects teacher and pupil alike. Individual genus and strung personal qualities have become merely subsidiary on both sides, but it must be said that this applies most to the teacher. In short, the strength of personal qualities, which went a long way m influencing those under his tuition, has gone ; to .the wall under the overload course of study and exactitude of system under which the teacher is now placed. For one thing, our educational system may be said to have lost a good deal of its flexibility. 1 1 is now subject to the advancement of enlighten ed ideas, and is fast losing all' that it possessed m this direction. Iv the infant department of our schools, the first principles of child-life are violated' m their primary stages. Forty or fifty children are placed under one teacher, who is enjoined, nay, compelled, to keep them m a condition of enforced quietude and constant employment. It is not, therefore, surprising that children should lose all love for education, that they should not survive* the outrages of the schoolroom. The long and dreary school hours are simply an imprisonment, with cora- v piilsory inactivity of body and nwtid^ the natural instincts of the child are either crushed or obscured and ..'the end of the day is welcomed as relief from the tedious and unpalatable' labors m which he had participated. The same process of contradiction, enforced quiet, constantemploymeht* and continual cram is pursued through all its stages. Quantity is therefore the outstanding evil oftlie existing system. Quantitive; results are looking for, without regard to corresponding quality, and the. result is positively harmful. Throughout the whole of this system the means is pnt for the end. Organisation and method may be run to extreme abuse, and the worshipper of system is apt to find out that after all system is not everything. There was once a minister of publjc instruction In France, who boasted on one occasion that he could look at his watch and tell exactly what question was being asked at the moment m every school of a certain grade m the country. We have not reached this extreme of methodical exactitude it is true, but we are m a fair way of coming to something approaching it. But upon this we may depend, that the system of education which defeats its own end by destroying individual liberty of action cannot be an incentive to lasting progress. It would never provide a sound basis of national education. It will turn out neat, cut and dry handwork, it will never give us a perfectly healthy product. Its products are crammed with knowledge, which leaves them as soon as they leave the scene of the cramming agency. Boys and girls will leave our schools with the unconscious fact clinging to them that they are at the summit of the tree of know, ledge, because they have passed the sixth standard. They will come out of the system, moreover, with a perfect and justifiable horror at the name of education, with a disgust at the very mention of the fact that their education is a life-long process, and with no love for all that is best and choicest m literature,