The Children: Some Educational Problems | Page 6

individual shall have the opportunity to develop
himself and to fit himself for the after performance of the service for
which by nature he is suited may do much to mitigate the evils incident

upon the industrial organisation of society. If this end is to be realised,
then three things at least are necessary. We must seek by some means
or other to check the large number of our boys and girls who, after
leaving the Primary School, drift year by year, either through the
ignorance or the cupidity or the poverty of their parents, into the ranks
of untrained labour, and who in the course of two or three years go to
swell the ranks of the unskilled, casual workers, and become in many
cases, in the course of time, the unemployed and the unemployable. In
the second place, we must endeavour to secure the better technical
training of the youth during their years of apprenticeship, and so tend to
raise the general efficiency of the workers of the nation whatever the
nature--manual or mental--of their employment. In the third place, we
must endeavour, by means of our system of education, to increase the
mobility of labour. In the modern State, where changes in the industrial
organisation are frequent, the worker who can most easily adapt
himself to changing circumstances is best assured of constant
employment, and a great part of the social evils of our time may be
traced to this want of mobility on the part of a large number of our
workers.
The mobility of labour is of course always determined within certain
limits, but much may and could be done by pursuing from the
beginning a right method in educating the child to develop its power of
self-adaptation to the needs of a changing environment.
If these results are to be attained, then we shall have, as a nation, to
make clear to ourselves the real meaning and purpose of education; we
shall have to make explicit the nature of the ends which we desire to
secure as the result of our educational efforts, and we shall have to
organise our educational agencies so that the ends desired shall be
secured.
Let us now consider the question of the meaning, purpose, and ends of
education.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] National Education and National Life, p. 1.

[2] Ochlos, a mob.
CHAPTER II
THE MEANING AND PROCESS OF EDUCATION
"Of all the animals with which the globe is peopled, there is none
towards whom nature seems, at first sight, to have exercised more
cruelty than towards man, in the numberless wants and necessities with
which she has loaded him, and in the slender means which she affords
to the relieving of these necessities. In other creatures these two
particulars generally compensate each other. If we consider the lion as
a voracious and carnivorous animal, we shall easily discover him to be
very necessitous, but if we turn our eye to his make and temper, his
agility, his courage, his arms, and his force, we shall find that his
advantages hold proportion with his wants.... In man alone this
unnatural conjunction of infirmity and of necessity may be observed in
the greatest perfection. Not only the food which is required for his
sustenance flies his search and approach, or at least requires his labour
to be produced, but he must be possessed of clothes and lodging to
defend him against the injuries of the weather: though to consider him
only in himself, he is provided neither with arms, nor force, nor other
natural abilities which are in any degree answerable to so many
'necessities.' 'Tis by society alone he is able to supply his defects and
raise himself up to an equality with his fellow-creatures, and even
acquires a superiority over them."[3] In these terms Hume draws the
distinction between man and the animals, and if, for the term Society,
we substitute the word Education, then we shall more truly describe the
means by which man overcomes his natural infirmities and meets his
necessities.
But we have to ask, Wherein does man differ from the animals? what
power or faculty does he possess over and above those possessed by
himself and the animals in common? and how does it happen that as his
wants and needs increase and multiply the means to satisfy them also
tend to increase? Now, the animal is guided wholly or mainly by
instinct. In the case of many animals the whole conduct of their life

from birth to death is governed by this means. In the case, indeed, of
some of the higher animals, there is a limited power of modifying this
government by instinct through the experience acquired during the
lifetime of the individual. But man alone possesses the power or faculty
of reason. And it