SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND REMEDIES.

Temuka Leader, Issue 1783, 30 August 1888, Page 2

SOCIAL PROBLEMS AND REMEDIES.

In a remarkably interesting paper contributed by Archdeacon Farrar to the Fortnightly Eeview on “Social Problems and Eemedies,” the following occurs, which is not'without its significance to us in New Zealand:— It is more painful to confess our disappointment as to the high hopes which were once attached to the spread of national education. That the Act of 1870 has produced many blessed effects we most thankfully admit, but it has failed to achieve anything like so much as we had once anticipated. “ Popular education,” says Professor Goldwin Smith, “has gone far enough to make the masses think—not far enough to make them think deeply; they read what falls in with their aspirations, and their minds run in the grooves thus formed; flattering theories make way rapidly, " and, like religious doctrines, are imbibed without examination by credu. lous and uncritical minds.” A stronger and ever stronger conviction is arising ~ in many minds that our existing scheme of national education requires radical revision. It produces poorer intellectual results than the educa> tional system of France and Germany at far greater cost. It is too doctrinaire; too much infected by a somewhat coarse standard of “ payment by results ; ” too much an education of books, and facts, and cram, and inspectors, and examinations: too little an education of the hand and of the heart. It leaves thousands without any means of earning their bread, while it widens the area of bitter discontent. It does not in the least enable us to hold our own against foreign competition, It tends disaa-y troiiiify to multiply the appalling superfluity of struggling clerkdom. “After twenty years of education,” says the Eev. S. D. Barnett, the result of his experience in the East End, “wo have neither taught selfrespect nor the means of earning a livelihood; our streets are filled with a mob of caieless youths, and our labor market overstocked with workers whose work is not worth fourpence an hour,”