TRUE EDUCATION.

White Ribbon, Volume 23, Issue 273, 18 March 1918, Page 11

TRUE EDUCATION.

DEVELOPMENT OF PERSONALITY. (“N.Z. Herald,” March 7th.) The tendon y of the present system of education to produce a type in place of personalities was aserted by the Rev. A. M. Niblock, vicar of St. George’s, Kingsland, in a Lenter address, delivered at the Chamber of Commerce yesterday, to have caused tht* 1 >ss of Great Britain’s industrial supremacy. lie maintained that the British, more than any other race, were sensitive to a dominion of great ideals, and, in order to find a way to reach these ideals, had set out to make tluir environment correspond o their ever-growing desire, labouring to perfect human relationships, to r *duce pain, and to reconstruct so- ' icty on workable lines. But with their labour they had not reached the end of their desire, because desire outgrew its satisfaction very rapidly. This, said the speaker, proved con- < lusively that thcie was something wrong with human personality, and • <ough we knew that the man Jesus was the ideal, we were no: willing to pay the price to reach his ideals of personality and moral perfection. The reason of this was that we had been wrongly educated. True education was not cramming a child’s head with acts and what is termed knowledge, )ut the unfolding of its own personHi:y to itself, and showing it a pattern personality upon which it could podel its own. This, he agreed, was the Church’s work, but the Church v is not the pulpit, but was—or ought to be—every member of the community. He referred to the systems ot education imported from Germany, which had done unqualified harm to a that is best in British genius, perm.m methods produced machines and subdued character, preventing liberty of growth and development of personality. After speaking of the weaknesses of the British system of

education, the speaker said: “1 do not ask that the Bible be brought back into the schools, but 1 do maintain that there is no such thing as true education, apait from the teachings of Christ. 1 maintain that Christian parents are doing their children an incalculable harm if they send them to a school without this element in it.” The speaker said that if education lasted only until we readied the grave, and helped us to scrape through life with a little ease, then the money spent was wasted and lost. We needed a new vision to enable us to see beyond the horizon of this life of material things, and to bring in the Kingdom of God now. The place to start was in the schoolroom'.