Alexander Darroch

“ In short, the aim of the Secondary School is, using the elementary systems as the basal means, to organise and establish other systems of means for the attainment of the more complex interests of after-life, practical and theoretical. The object of establishing a system of knowledge is not to pass examinations,—this is the schoolmaster's error,—but to render future action more efficient, to further in after-life some complex interest of a practical or theoretical nature. To the few, indeed, the establishment and systematisation of knowledge may be an end in itself. ”

“ CHAPTER IX THE AIM OF PHYSICAL EDUCATION
"A sound mind in a sound body is a short but full description of a happy state in this world. He that has these two has little more to wish for, and he that wants either of them will be but little the better for anything else." ”

“ But the provision of the means of elementary education, and the imposing of a legal obligation upon each individual parent to utilise the means provided, is not merely or solely for the protection of society. Education confers not only a social benefit upon the community, but a particular benefit upon the individual. Its provision falls not within the merely negative benefits conferred by the State by its protection of the majority against the ignorance and wickedness of the minority, but it belongs to the positive benefits conferred by Government upon its individual members. ”

“ For, by means of the games and occupations of the Kindergarten School, the child may first of all learn what it means to co-operate with his fellows for a common end or purpose; may learn to submit to authority which he dimly and imperfectly, it may be, perceives to be reasonable; may be trained to habits of accuracy, of order, and of obedience. Above all, the Kindergarten system may rouse and foster in the mind of the child that sense of a corporate life and of a common social spirit the prevalence of which in after-life is the only secure foundation of society. ”

“ No one indeed wishes to make everything in the school pleasant to the child, or to reduce self-effort to a minimum. But effort and interest are not opposed terms. The effort which is evoked in the realisation of an interest or end of felt value is the only kind of effort which possesses any educational value. The effort which is called forth in the finding and establishing of a system of means towards an end which the child fails to see, and which, as a consequence, rouses no direct interest in its attainment, is an effort which should for ever be banished from the schoolroom. ”

“ If the objection be made that the granting of aid on mere need shown is to place the stigma of pauperism upon the recipient, then the only answer is that in so thinking the individual misconceives the real nature of the aid, fails to understand that it is help towards doing without help—aid to enable the individual to reach a higher and fuller development of his powers, both for his own future welfare and for the betterment of society. ”

“ He feels, tastes, and bites everything that comes within his reach, and so acquires a world of new experiences. Hence for "the first six years of his life a child has quite enough to do in learning its place in the universe and the nature of its surroundings, and to compel it during any part of that period to give its attention to mere words and symbols is to stint it of the best part of its education for that which is only of secondary importance, and to weaken the foundations of its whole mental fabric." ”

“ One of the strongest points in the German system of education, as compared and contrasted with our own, is the care which is taken of the higher education of the children of the working classes during the period when it is most important that some control should be exercised over the youth of the country, throughout the time when the boy is most open to temptation, and when the moral forces of society are potent for good and evil in shaping and forming his character. The great majority of the children in a modern State are and must be destined for industrial service ”

“ Education does not aim at culture nor at knowledge for its own sake, but at fitting the individual for social service. Our school system tends ever to forget this truth. It is in constant danger of losing sight of this ultimate aim of education by keeping its attention too narrowly fixed on some nearer and proximate aim. ”

“ But manifestly at this early stage the larger number are not fitted to guide and control their own lives; and if moral education aims, as it ought to aim, at fitting the individual for freedom, at fitting him to guide and direct his own life in the light of a self-accepted and a self-directed ideal, then some measure of control, of guidance, and of regulation is necessary in the years when the child is passing from youth to manhood. Now, it is this fact, this truth, which the Germans as a nation have realised. ”

“ During this period nothing of an organised nature is done to secure the physical efficiency of the youth of our working classes; nothing or almost nothing is done to secure his future industrial efficiency; and, as a consequence, year after year, as a nation, we go on fostering an army of loafers, increasing the ranks of the unskilled workers, and even in our skilled trades adding to the number of those who are mere process workers, at the expense of producing workers acquainted both theoretically and practically with every department of their particular calling. ”

“ But the practical realisation of the ideal need not involve that education should be free from the lowest to the topmost rung of the so-called educational ladder. It is indeed questionable whether the ladder simile has not been a potent instrument in giving a wrong direction to our ideals of the essential nature of what an educational organisation should aim at. Education should indeed provide a system of advancing means, but the system of means may lead to many and various aims instead of one. ”

“ Thus the general nature of our conscious human life is that throughout we are striving to attain ends of a more or less explicit nature, and endeavouring to find out and to establish means for their attainment. Whether in the performance of some simple, practical act, or in trying to observe accurately what is presented to us through the senses, or in endeavouring to realise imaginatively something not directly presented to the senses, or in performing an abstract process of thought, the activity of reason in its formal aspect is ever one and the same. ”

“ If fining and imprisonment of the parent only accentuate the sufferings of the child, if they fail to make the parent realise his responsibility and reform his conduct, if the provision of a free meal at school means less food at home, then there is only one thorough-going remedy for the evil, and that is to take the child away from the parent, to educate and feed him at the public expense, and to recover the cost as far as possible from the parent. ”

“ To postulate this would be to affirm that there is a kind of experience useful for the realisation indifferently of any and every purpose of adult life, and to affirm that a system of knowledge acquired and organised for the attainment of certain definite ends can be used for the furtherance of ends different in character and having no intrinsic connection with each other. Further, to assert that there is one type of education equally suited to train and to develop the reason-activity of the individual in every direction is to neglect the fact that individuals differ in innate capacity. ”

“ A true democracy is in fact ever aristocratic, in the original sense of that term. A false democracy ever tends to become ochlocratic, and the only safeguard against such a state of conditions arising in a country where representative government exists is the spread of higher education, and the inculcation of a right conception of the nature and functions of the State and of the duties of citizenship. ”

“ For, in spite of all that has been done during the past thirty years to increase the facilities for education and to improve the means of instruction, there is a deep-seated and widely spread feeling that, somehow or other, matters educationally are not well with us, as a nation, and that in this particular line of social development other countries have pushed forward, whilst we have been content to lag behind in the educational rear. ”

“ Where our English Public School system is strong, our Elementary and sometimes even our Day Secondary School systems are weak. If the home fails to foster these qualities, and the school does not or cannot fill the gap, then as a rule we turn out our boys and girls poorly equipped to fulfil their duties in after-life as members of a corporate community and as citizens of a State. Mere teaching of history or of civics in our schools will do little to attain this end, unless by some method or other we can foster by means of the school-life the real civic spirit. ”

“ But at the same time he strenuously insists that there should be no monopoly of education by the State. It is not desirable, he declares, that a government should have complete control over the education of the people. To possess such a control and actually to exert it would be despotic. The State may, however, require that all its people shall have received a certain measure of education, but it may not prescribe from whom or where they may obtain it. ”

“ In many minds State control is synonymous with government by inspectors and other officials of the central authority. But bureaucratic control in a nation whose government is founded on a representative basis is a disease rather than a normal condition of such government. In a country where the sovereign power is vested in an individual or in a limited number of individuals, bureaucratic control is and must be an essential feature of its government. ”