IMPERIAL TEACHING. Visual Instruction for Colonials.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 233, 17 December 1904, Page 6

IMPERIAL TEACHING. Visual Instruction for Colonials.

IT is pretty safe to assert that the average colonial youngster knows more about the Old Country and British history than the Home youngster knows about the colonies, for the British youngster looks upon all the colonies as merely "abroad, ' and where everybody wears a big hat, revolvers, and a sunburnt, bearded face. The colonial youngster knows a lot of dates, and that King Henry VIII. had a heap of wives Also the manufactures for which certain spots of Britain are famed. On the whole, he has an elementary knowledge of British statesmen, British writers, and British geography The knowledge of the British youngster of the colonies is, as a rule, worse than elementary — it doesn't exist * * * Now, some good souls at Home (in the London School of Economics) have suggested that, as an incentive to a wider knowledge, colonial kiddies should have imparted to them a visual knowledge of the' Motherland per lantern slide It sounds very excellent, and we hope it will come off, but the Home youngster is much more m need of visual and other knowledge of the colonies than his colonial cousin is m need of visual knowledge of Britain. The London people appear to- assume that the colonial nipper wants lifting out of the mire, so to speak * * # While on the subject of learning for colonial and British youngsters, it is interesting to notice that in neither Britain nor the colonies do the authorities teach cheerfulness. The authorities, m supplying poetry and other books, select the most lugubrious subjects — "My lodging is the cold cold ground, "The Blind Boy," death, disaster, illness, and poverty What for, it is hard to imagine. Does the colonial youngster need visual knowledge of this kind? Whitechapel Road on a Saturday night, for instance A gin palace in full swing Petticoat Lane on Sunday morning The casual ward of a big "workho'ixse ' ? The colonial youngster is posted up per travelling kmematograph in the kingly castles of the Home Land, the warships, and the machine-drill-ed soldiers The Imperial spirit is already ablaze We would have liked Mr Lyttelton to have heard the Wellington youngsters sing "The British Grenadiers" the otlier day at the Town Hall, but we'd like better for the Home youngsters to understand that England is not the Empne as New Zealand youngsters already know that New Zealand is only a speck of it. The remarks of Lord Ranfurly on this question of visual instruction, that there was urgent necessity to unite the Empire in bonds of sympathy were really quite superfluous. The sympathy always existed, and always will exist, and the sympathy of the colonies for the Old Countryis keener than the sympathy of the Old Country for the colonies. If the London School of Economics believe the youngsters at Home know all that is necessary about us, and that we know nothing of Britain, they start at the wrong end. What is wanted is to impart as much knowledge of the colonies at Home as the colonies possess of the people who propose the scheme, and then have Imperial examinations In any competitive examinations that might be held now, with colonial and British children as rivals, the former would emphatically "wipe out" the latter in general knowledge of the Empire