HIGH-PRESSURE EDUCATION.

Thames Star, Volume X, Issue 3112, 7 February 1879, Page 4

HIGH-PRESSURE EDUCATION.

The Daily Times, in an article a few days ago, made the following very timely remarks':—Our youth will have to be reminded that education, after all, only gives possibility, that cleverness is not sense, that quick wit is not wisdom, that learning is not insight, and that capacity to think deeply and feel deeply is something sevenfold more valuable than to read Latin or speak German. Our teachers, and those who superintend them and apply the spur, will have to be on their guard against working at high pressure: sacrificing the unformed boys aDd girls by teaching them with Spartan rigour, exacting an annual percentage of health and life as an offering to the god of learning; creating permanent mental debility by precocious culture, and raising monuments of juvenile learning on poor and shallow foundations. Parents may have to apply the curb and break, and let our teachers know that they wish their children's minds to grow quietly and healthily, even if they carry less matter; that they count it more important that their bodies should be healthy than that they should know the physiological laws of health, and are well persuaded that a dull, backward, sturdy lad of fourteen will ultimately conquer the clever unhealthy miracle of intelligence. They may have to make known that they would not give the bloom on the cheeks nor the glow in their daughters^ eyes for loads of ponderous learning, which makes the eyes dim and cheeks sallow. Recognition of all this enters fully enough into our theory of education; but if the parents could be questioned they would say that there is danger of its being lost sight of in our ambitious practice. Our youths are being kept firmly to their lessons, and that is so far well and good; but we have no desire to see their holidays unduly curtailed, and have no hostility to the patron saints, who have done good service to the boys and girls hitherto, and for no crime are threatened with extinction from the academic calendar. We trust that far and wide Saturday will ever be consecrated to play; that we shall not regard the long midsummer holiday with any jealousy; but bravely and honestly offering it to the god of health, that teachers and scholars will live during the fleeting weeks as if letters, writing, printing, and books had not yet emerged to complicate existence.