STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE SHE DID?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 16, Issue 399, 14 February 1947, Page 21

STANDS SCOTLAND WHERE SHE DID?

Proposed Educational Reforms Provoke an Argument A CABLE message trom London the other day, hinting at radical changes in Scottish educational methods, caused a minor explosion in "The Listener" office and sent us out to gather comment from Scots in New Zealand. We summarise below, first, the cable; then the domestic argument; and finally three outside opinions.

sage, the Advisory Council on Education in Scotland has recommended to the British Ministry of Education that Scots schoolchildren should be freed of homework and pr'mary school-leaving examinations. The council contends that research into child psychology has shown that handwork and hobbies calling for personal initiative are more important in education than "forced knowledge of-arithmet c and writing." Its report advocates the elimination of competitive examinations at the stage of transfer from primary to secondary school, and the substitution of" intelli-gence-tests; recommends that schools "should wage a planned and unrelenting campaign aga.nst the worthless, jumble of shipshod, ungrammatical, and vulgar forms of speech masquerading as Scots," and discounts the supposed "disciplinary" value of homework on the ground that "overtime for school pupils is in the end as uneconomic as it is for adult workers." F.nally, it emphasises that the aim of education should be to produce happy, hard-working citizens, rather than thrifty, unimaginative plodders or feather-brained "good time" seekers. to the cable mesPro. v. Con. HORN of’ a quantity of heathery verbiage, and done into some semblance of Engl.sh, here is the substance of the argument over these proposals which developed in The Listener office between the liberal humanist McA. and the craggy conservative McB. (neither of them being‘ aware that there was a chiel amang them. " notes): McA. In gansta $y pprove ee "the proposals, and my " s are _ these: much influenced by mercenary cons.derations. The only idea is one of getting education atid getting on-especially getting on. This is to be understood in a country that is all cold and barren, The Scots have to get on or get out to have a comfortable life. In other words, their country cannot support them,

McB. ah, ®eneral’; I d. sappFove™ of the’ proposals... Their effect is going to be a depressing of Scottish eduéational standards_ into -. something like conformity with those’ south of the Border. And I

flatly reject the suggestion that Scots education .is influenced by mercenary considerations. It’s true that on the University level poverty has prevented the leisurely acquisition of wisdom-the

tutorial system of Oxford and Cambridge is made possible by rich endowments denied to the Scots colleges-but in learning the hard way the Scot has acqu red strength of character as well as strength of mind. Nothing worthwhile is gained without some tribulation. McA. But there is too much grind, too much mere drill; not enougi liberty or liberality in the system. McB. The fault wth other systems is that there is too little grind, as you call it, too little discipline and too much licence. The trouble with a large percentage of the human race is that it is suffering from a fatty degenerat on of the will. McA, Bigotry will not cure that, and the by-products. of Scots education are bigotry, dogmatism, and a rigid conception of right and wrong in matters that

cannot be narrowed down to such simple equations as that. There is great earnestness in Scottish education, but very little tolerance. McB. It is true that there is much earnestness, and there may be too little tolerance, but a nation which, for a thousand years, has had to bend down and pull itself up by its own bootstraps can be forgiven for getting stiffnecked Anyway, these faults derive from virtues that far outweigh them-originality of thought and independence of mind, and a traditional love of learning for its own sake. McA. Scotland has filled the world with good technical men — engineers, doctors, accountants, and so on, but not with real philosophers. There i$ surely something wrong with a system that in 500 years has produced one great poet (who had hardly any education), one cantankerous prophet who had too much, ‘and one or two philosophers pe. in the highest class. ‘ McB.° Hold on! You can’t duue an educational system for that. Men are

poets and prophets and philosophers in spite of themselves, and certainly in spite of whatever education they may or may not have had. Offhand, I can remember only one. English poet of world significance whose educat on was formal and orthodox. And if Milton was not a crammer I'll eat my Balmoral bonnet. R McA. Inasmuch as Milton's writing reveals his crammed erudition, the less Milton he. McB. The plain fact of the matter, of course, is that in your 500 years Scotland’s population was an e ghth of England’s. And show me eight English poets of Burns’s stature, eight English Carlyles, 16 Sassenach Lockes and Humes (I won't drag in the Scotts and the Stevensons, the Barries or the Munroes; and you concede the leadership of the Watts, Kelvins, and Simpsons). * McA. The fact remains that their upbringing has made Scots, in general, narrow-m nded rather than tolerant, doers rather than thinkers, scientists and shipbuilders rather than poets and philosophers. McB. And what is this new upbringing going to produce? What alarms me most is the attack on the system of homework and examinations. I would like to see refuted, once and for all, that degenerate doctr.ne which rejects the discipline of hard work as a condition of achievement. Life is not Jaissezfaire, and education should not be. I do not suggest that children should be overburdened, but they must have mental and moral discipline imposed upon them from the outside before they can develop the inner discipline which makes not only the good citizen but the whole man. The roads which lead to the frontiers of the human spirit are too steep for weakI ngs. If we make life too easy for our children we play a confidence trick on them. McA. You cannot make; men by breaking children, or by, boiling them in midnight oil. The Scots educational system has been graceless-that is my principal charge against. it. It has produved imen ‘Of of aiid strong moral fervour, but lacking in(continued on next pages» —

Scots Speak Their Minds

"(continued from previous page) fiexibility and liberality of mind. It is all to the good that some of this rigour is going to be relaxed. (At th’s point both paused to regain their breath, and we folded our notebook and silently stole away to do some more orthodox interviewing.) Confused Reporting? "|N the first place," seid Charles Cameron, a’ former member of the New Education Fellowship in Scotland now resident in New Zealand, "it looks like a piece of confused reporting. The Br tish Ministry of Education has nothing to do with education in Scotland, which is administered by the Scottish Education Department, en autonomous and independent body under the Secretary of State for Scotland." Discussing homework, Mr. Cameron said that children’s d fficulties arose more et the secondary school stage, where there was often insufficient co-ordination between. teachers in reguleting the amount of home preparation set From the parents’ point of view, homework presented two problems. In the first place, a large number of children in Scots urban areas were inadequate'y housed at home-there was no peece and quietness in which to study, and this could be as much an irritant as the content of the homework itself. Secondly, homework tended to come between the child and its parents, and prevent them finding and sharing common social interests. Such shared experience was most important in the earlier -tages of the ch Id’s life. "Not all homework, of course, is boring and futile,’ he went on, "some can be vastly interesting. The project method in education-whether the project is one requiring general reading or the search ng for informaticn-is usually successful, and children are quite happy to do that kind of study at home. But many children whose homes _ are cramped or crowded wou'd be helped by access to study rooms at school or by better study facilities at public libraries." The cutting out of homework in the primary school was all to the good, and it did not mean that the ch 1d who was interested in his studies would not pursue these interests after school hours. The Council’s recommendation that examinations be eliminated at the stage of transfer from primary to secondary school simply meant that c!asswork, along wth the measure of an_ intelligence test, was recognised as better than an examination for assessing over-all capacity at the age of 11. "Orthodox Scots will condemn the dropping of homework ¢s_ moliycoddling," Mr. Cameron added, "but themajority of parents won't object so long as they feel that their children are not being retarded thereby. And, naturally, success will depend on the extent to which lecal education author ties-and headmasters-can be persuaded that dropping homework won't mean lowering educational standards. It must be remembered, however, that the school is not. only a plece of instruction It is a community where children should learn to live in the social sense." Case for Homework ua STAND strongly for homework; ang it "s something you will not get without direction from the school. And, anyway, homework in Scotland is —

already rationed and pretty well under control," said Mrs. Ian Gordon, a graduate of Edinburgh University, and a former teacher of English in Ayrshire schools, in an .nterview. "There’s nothing revolutionary about the recommendations of the Advisory Council. It is simp:y recommending methods which foremost educationists in Scotland have been using for some time." It was qu te wrong to believe that all children needed the same time to learn. Possibly, to the brilliant child, homework might not be necessary; yet the slow child might have assimilated dhly half a lesson at school. He would be handicapped further by not having homework, and so slow down the whole pace of the class. And quite often, said Mrs. Gordon, the quck mind did not necessarily. retain all it learned. Rates of assimilation differed vastly, and it was fallacious to call the quick child clever, and the slow child stupid. Many of the great scientists were slow learners, mak ng quite sure that they understood

one subject utterly and retained its meaning before passing on to the next. "But are not the distractions in a modern home likely to handicap a child’s concentration?" we asked, "I don't think so, if the child is allowed to work ‘n good surroundings. The home offers opportunities for concentration which no schoolroom could give-if the radio’s off!" A child would not do homework if not compelled, said Mrs. Gordon. Like taking his food, a certain amount of compulsion was necessary. "In Scotland we d vided homework into two typespractice and preparatory. Practice was . for the slower child and preparatory work wes to allow the quicker pupil to break fresh ground as a training towards independent thought." "What about the move to cancel examinations?" . "Tes 10 years since I taught in a Scottish school, but there, on entering, all children were put through an ‘ntelligence test. That, combined with attainments in school examinations, was the guide to the subsequent grading of the pupil. I taught in several academies in Ayrshire and, as far as I know, all the better schools in Scotland have been us ng intelligence tests for the transfer from primary to secondary schools for a good many years. Good marks, plus the tests, give the child the right of entry to the higher forms." But the trend to relax examinations ieotn just an evasion of something else. ~ And. that tendency was seen to-day -from the primary school to the univers-

ity. Human beings could not be equated; equality and standardisat on often became confused. We asked Mrs. Gordon what she thought of the reference in the council’s report to "vulgar forms of speech masquerading as Scots." "Scottish children," she said, "have no difficulty in speaking good English. Their own language does not hurt it. Where I taught and lived, some of the ch.ldren certainly used different words from the others, but it was by no means debased English. Where the dialect exists side by side with good English, it should certainly not be discouraged." Brain and Fingers R. ELIZABETH BRYSON told us that she agreed in part wth the recommendations, holding that education cannot be forced into a child; he would not concentrate unless definitely interested. Also it must never be forgotten that brain and hand go together: to educate the hand is to educate the brain. In regard to homework and its proposed abol tion, Dr. Bryson said that if homework was a burden-if parents bad to be called in to help-there ‘was something wrong with the teaching or with the child. "Personally," she said, "I think it would be ‘all to the good to cut out compulsory homework. School life should not be a grim battle, with unw lling children and _ over-arixious parents combining to waste precious hours over homework." On the other hend a child living an active healthy life and enjoying the stimulus of new mental interests could hardly be deterred frorn doing homework and certainly should not be discouraged. No amount of will ng concentration could hurt a child; and mental effort was as necessary for mental growth as bodily exercises were for' physical growth. Recommended intelligence tests, she went on, are interesting end could give valuable help to a teacher in assessing a chi'd’s fitness for school advancement. But they should be used as an indicaton only of the child’s present stage of development and no child should be labelled success or failure as the result of intelligence or competitive tests. Some children do poorly in primary school and develop surprisingly later on. "With the recommendation that all competitive exam nations at the stage of transfer from primary to secondary schogl should be abolished, I am heartily in agreement," said Dr. Bryson, "but a competitive spirit within the schoo!the friendly tivalry of keen ch Idren endeavouring to excel each other and to exceed their own previous best efforts -that is not only valuable, but probably indispensabie in a good educational system." On the subject of spoken English, Dr. Bryson had firm opinions. A little Doric, she sad, was an enrichment of English language. To say that a war against ungremmatical and vulgar forms of speech would lead to the disappearance of Scots dialect betrayed a lack of understanding. Scottish schools had always taught good grammatical English. The educated Scots child spoke good English with a Scots accent; he could also speak Scots dialect when he wanted to. For this reason the educated Scot often spoke more correct English than the Englishman. "D'dn’t Robbie Burns write poetry in Scots dialect?" said Dr. Bryson, "and who could write more beautiful English when he chose to write in English?"