The Children: Some Educational Problems | Page 3

Universities and
to supply the needs of the learned professions. But with the economic

development of the country, and as a consequence of the keen
international competition between nation and nation in the economic
sphere, there has arisen a demand for a higher education different in
kind from that provided by the older Universities, and a need for a type
of Secondary School different in aim and curriculum from that which
looks mainly to the provision of students intending to enter upon some
one or other of the so-called well recognised learned professions. It is
here, when compared and contrasted with the educational systems of
some of our Continental neighbours, that we find the weakest point in
our own system, and at the present time our most urgent need is for the
extension and better equipment of the central institutions of the country
which provide higher technical and commercial instruction.
This unsatisfactory condition of things is due in large measure, as we
have already pointed out, to our innate dislike as a nation of all
system-making, and to the distrust felt by many minds of any and every
form of State control of education. Hence, partly from these causes,
partly as a result of historical conditions, it has followed that various
authorities have in this country the guidance and control of education,
with the usual result of want of unity of aim, of lack of correlation of
means, and in some cases of overlapping and waste of the means of
higher education.
In the second place, while much has been done since the advent of
compulsory elementary education to better the means of education and
to increase the facilities for the higher instruction of the youth of the
country, there is a widespread belief that all the hopes held out by the
early advocates of universal compulsory education have not been
realised, and that our Primary Schools in large measure have failed to
turn out the type of citizen which a State such as ours requires for her
after-service.
Universal education has not proved a panacea for all the social evils of
the Commonwealth, and while it must be admitted that much good has
resulted from the adoption of universal and compulsory education, yet
at the same time certain evils have followed in its train.
Since the institution of universal education, it may be argued that the

children of the nation have received a better training in the use of the
more mechanical arts of reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the
tendency has been to look upon the acquisition of these arts as ends in
themselves, rather than as mere instruments for the further extension
and development of knowledge and practice, and hence our Primary
School system, to a large extent, has failed to cultivate the imagination
of the child, and has also failed to train the reason and to develop
initiative on the part of the pupil. There has been more instruction, it
has been said, during the last thirty years, but less education; for the
process of education consists in the building up within the child's mind
of permanent and stable systems of ideas which shall hereafter function
in the attainment and realisation of the various ends of life. Now, our
school practice is still largely dominated by the old conception that
mere memory knowledge is all-important, and as a consequence much
of the so-called knowledge acquired during the school period is found
valueless in after life to realise any definite purpose, for it is only in so
far as the knowledge acquired has been systematised that it can
afterwards be turned to use in the furtherance of the aims of adult life.
From this it follows that, since much of the knowledge acquired during
the school period has no bearing on the real and practical needs of life,
the Primary School in many cases fails to create any permanent or real
interest in the works either of nature or of society.
But a much more serious charge is laid at times against our Primary
School system. It is contended that during the past thirty years it has
done little to raise the moral tone of the community, and it has done
still less to develop that sense of civic and national responsibility
without which the moral and social progress of a nation is impossible.
Our huge city schools are manufactories rather than educational
institutions--places where yearly a certain number of the youth of the
country are turned out able to some extent to make use of the
mechanical arts of reading and writing, and with a smattering of many
branches of knowledge, but with little or no training for the moral and
civic responsibilities of life. This is evident, it is urged, if we consider
how little the school