SIR GEORGE REID ON EDUCATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 10138, 8 November 1910, Page 4

SIR GEORGE REID ON EDUCATION.

-■■ ' u Sir George Ileid is an educationalist as well as a High Commissioner. In a recent address before the British Association, he said: "In my days we were taught by a series of abstruce propositions. If there is one curse to a young mind it is endeavouring to make it master, in the gimmerings of its growing consciousness, abstract mota-physical propositions. It will bo a grand thing when our men of science do : really know everything they write about and talk about—because, when they do, they will be able to tell us what it all means in plain English. Take the child. What is its predominant mental attribute? Curiosity, a desire to learn. The child is fallow soil, ready to be cultivated; its mind is not twisted, not vicious, but bright, unspotted, curious. But how is it that the child finds the school a sort of prison ? I mean a child like myself. * How is it that he finds school a sort of penitentiary? I sometimes think it is because the mind is treated in a way that the body is never treated—sometimes gets walnuts with the shells on. I think the first thing that I, as an outsider, would like to see would be that memory shall not be put in too high a place in mental education. If you want to-get the finest triumph of accurate memory you get it out of the phonograph. Memory, is a- facility without which all the other faculties are more or less useless, but do not forget that memory, if it becomes original, is not memory at all. Memory never adds anything' to your mental conceptions. It brings raw material into your mental factory. Memory is a. warehouse, not a factory. The highest powers of the mind are the powers of the factory. Excellent memory, however, is. sometimes mistaken for mental power. It is thus that many men get marvellous prizes at .-universities and are never heard of aaain afterwards."