PURPOSES OF EDUCATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 656, 1 February 1952, Page 5

PURPOSES OF EDUCATION

Sir-H. C. Dent’s talk summarised in The Listener (January 18) brings into focus a number of interesting educatienal questions, and perhaps would have raised more but for the natural reticence and courtesy of an English visitor. In some ways it is a pity some of these things cannot be openly discussed more fully in print. On the other hand, a lot of talk about some of the really important questions of our day does little good. What use is it, for instance, to raise the question of professional status as between secondary and primary school teachers? It may be illogical that such a distinction should exist, but where there is a real vocation the humble pupil teacher will care as little about it as the-porter of a Trappist monastery that he is not the Father Abbot. Of more importance, perhaps, is the occasional airing of the real purposes of education; namely, that it does not matter particularly if there is a lack of training in the technique of material advancement or scientific research and that the training does not enable the pupil to. "get on" or to make money or to grow wool or what have you. Bound up in this is the question of philosophy and particularly Christian philosophy. Criticism of lack of time may be met by saying that academic study is always incomplete at whatever age or stage you look at it. It has been well said that there is little evidencé since Charlemagne that the State cherishes scholarship for its own sake, Universal literacy is a utilitarian aim and is not directed to breadth of mind or wisdom or even the mastery of the elements of thought and language. Consider Joyce Cary’s literate Africans. If this needs any further proof, laugh for a moment at the spectacle of Latin studies in our secondary schools today. It is indeed very true, as stated in New Zealand in the recent speech from the Throne, that our New Zealand schools are Christian, but whether this is of purpose or by historical accident is another matter, I doubt that there is any common purpose behind education in’ New Zealand today, decent men though the teachers are. Our ancestors endowed schools to teach Christian philosophy, to inculcate the principles underlying a code of conduct. If you gave £1,000,000 to endow the pean #2 anagiow District High School what would be your object in so endowing. it? But the founder of, say, Winchester understood Latin sufficiently to know that education comes from a verb meatiing to. lead along (a path), even if its a garden path; and has nothing to do with the strange modern notion that ‘it Means educing something or other out of the pupil; like releasing a spring for a jack-in-the-box. If we don’t look out all we'll get will be jacks-in-the-box or, alternatively (as Disraeli forecast). clever villains.

CHRISTIAN SCHOOLS

(Wellington).