AGILE MINDS IN AGILE BODIES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 15, Issue 387, 22 November 1946, Page 19

AGILE MINDS IN AGILE BODIES

Educationist Goes Back to First Principles

"TF a writer doesn’t entertain, as all as instruct, his readers stop reading. If .a broadcaster doesn’t hold interest with his presentation his listeners turn the knob to something that does. Why should teachers expect to be treated differently? Why should they feel any right to demand attention instead of attracting it?" HAT is the approach to education of Dr. J. Macalister Brew (J. for Josephine; Dr. for LL.D.) who has been giving short courses to New Zealand "youth work leaders" in all the New Zealand main centres on her way home to Britain from the New Education Fellowship Conference in Australia. "We are just about through with writers who expect their readers to work hard at understanding them," went on Dr. Brew. "It only means that they have not worked hard enough themselves at comprehending what they are trying to teach others. And I hope we are getting suspicious also of people who cover up the deficiencies in their thinking with polysyllabic words. For ‘anything that is clearly conceived can be clearly expressed,’ as Aristotle said long ago. Education, once schooling is passed, is a leisure-time occupation for practically everybody: And people who have worked hard all day have a right to be entertained in their leisure; not made to work more. Besides, education for the majority of people is not an intellectual activity but a social one. Therefore it takes place in the places where they eat and dance and play. So those of us who want our fellows to be better educated need to get out

of our cold classrooms and dingy de> | tivities to where people are actually doing the things they want to do and insert education into those activities." These were Dr. Brew’s "first principles" of education for adults and young people. She proceeded to illustrate them

from her own experience as the "officer responsible for the educational content in the activities of the groups that are served by the National Association- of Girls’ and Mixed Clubs-a pioneer body in informal education which is backed by a substantial British Government grant." — Poetry in Pubs "For example, someone started a ‘Poetry in Pubs’ movement about 1937, and I ‘opened’ the first Pictures in Pubs exhibition just before coming out here. Pubs, of course, are not drinking holes in Britain, but quite often a sort of poor man’s club. Well, the men there can ‘take’ poetry, and Shaw, and Priestley, and Shakespeare-though I don’t see them rolling up to lecture rooms in response to invitations to ‘a Poetry Reading’ pasted on the Town Hall ngticeboard. The only time that any of us got chucked out, in fact, was when a party tried to ‘talk down’ to the audience by putting on a West End Comedy. Only don’t suppose that we went in saying ‘gentlemen, I’m going to read you some Tennyson. No, you just sat and read poetry yourself the first evening. Next evening probably someone asked you what you were reading and you started discussing it. A group gathered round and you found yourself spouting to the whole room. "There’s no halo of sanctity about the other method of teaching-the formal invitation, the 12-lecture series, and the rows of seats. The great teachers who launched mankind on to new seas of thought never worked that way. Socrates kept questioning his friends as they sat enjoying the sun in the street. (continued on next page)

Education as a Social Activity

(continued from previous page) Jesus told intriguing topical stories on a walk between one village and another, "What educates young people to-day after they leave school? The radio, the films and the newspapers. Or rather these provide the raw material for education. Because a thing doesn’t become part of your experience just because you see it or it happens to you, No, you have to think it over after it has happened if it is to educate you, if it is to become part of yourself, your growing self. And how does that happen? Usually through discussing it. "So our idea in British clubs -no matter what organisation it is that Tuns them — is to start by giving the members the chance to do what they want to do, and then to seize whatever opportunities offer as they come along to make them discuss things that rise out of their activity. For example, people may begin by doing nothing but dancing. But if they are still doing nothing but dancing after six months under your leadership, you are a bally poor leader and teacher. What the starting point is doesn’t much mat--provided it is your club members’ real interest. Film groups, for example,

don’t need to spend much of their time seeing ‘educational’ films in the clubrooms. They can be mostly going in parties to commercial films. And it doesn’t much matter there either if a lot of the films they choose to see are bad ones. A bad film has as many talking points as a good one. The essential thing is to talk about what you see. Because the only way to increase your awareness and to raise standards of taste is to bring your reactions up to the level of consciousness," Radio Discussions And could the same principle be applied to radio listening, I asked. "In two ways at least," said Dr. Brew. "Bither you can discuss what you have heard on the radio, or you can listen in to discussions that aré so on the nail of your own problems that» you identify yourself with the voices and it becomes your own debate. We got 412 million people listening to our To Start You Talking series-more than to any other straight talks series, except, of course, the Brains Trust. We didn’t keep them quite ‘straight.’ In the middle of the talk called "Browned Off,’ for instance, the situation the speaker was describing suddenly began happening. The boy of the family, and his sister, both came into

the kitchen in one of those fits of depression that adolescents quite normally get. Mother tried to worm the reason for it out of them which made them clamp up like oysters, because of course there was no reason, no reason that could be explained. And then Dad, the jolly sort came in and tried to jolly them out of it-which simply made them mad with him... . and then the speaker’s voice came back and discussed the incident we had just overheard. The other talks in the series also dealt with adol--escents’ personal relations, because that is what matters to adolescents. Lots of parents must have listened too, because many wrote in thanking us for illuminating their family problems. "That’s education to me-illuminating problems, my problems. No one can ‘keep abreast of the times’ to-day. They move too fast, on too wide a front. But we can keep alert enough to recognise the implications of events as they happen. And we do that best by sharpening our minds on each other. An educated man, I reckon, is one who can entertain himself, entertain a stranger and entertain a strange idea. But being as internally. rich and as supple as that requires constant exercise. We must get ourselves and our young people as keen on mental agility as they now are

on physical agility." _

A.M.

R.