The Children: Some Educational Problems | Page 6

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 is through the possession of this power that he alone of all creatures can be educated; it is the possession of this power which places him above the rest of creation, and it is in the possession of this power that the possibility of his greatness, and also of his baseness, lies. Now, an instinct may be defined as an inborn and inherited system