THE BEGINNING OF THE STUDY OF LIFE

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3376, 2 March 1920, Page 7

THE BEGINNING OF THE STUDY OF LIFE

"The root defect of our modern primary and secondary education ia that it iacks vitality and unity," writes Sir Sidney Low, in the "Guardian." "The pupil learns a great many things, but he learns them without relation to one another and without relation to the facts and experiences of life. "The moment he enters the classroom he breathes an artificial atmosphere; he passes from the world of things and people and action to the world of books and printed paper and words. Knowledge is conveyed to him through these media, ond it is conveyed in separate and disconnected instalments. "I have often wondered what must be the state of mind of a boy who looks back at night upon a busy school day. He has spent perhaps an hour at arithmetic, or algebra, an hour at French or Latin, an hour at 'English,' by which is probably meant 'parsing* and grammar, an hour at history, an hour over chemistry or physicc, and he has had a Scripture reading, and it may be listened to or recited a passage of poetry. I can imagine the young pupil asking himself what all these subjects have to do with one another, and what In any case most of them have to do with him, who presently is going into his father's office to make money by the wholesale boot trade. "What he needs, especially at the earlier stages, is something that will link all this unrelated instruction together, and show that it has a meaning, a purpose, and a plan, and that no part of it is a mere abstraction, but is intimately connected with that living, palpitating, organic world of which he is acutely, if vaguely, conscious. Where is this synthetic element to be found? "In my opinion, by making geography the basis of our whole primary education, ond using it as a step to further knowledge of natural and physical science, history, languages, economics, and literature.

"Men differ from one another in all sorts of wavs. But one characteristic they have in common — they are all inhabitants of this planet we call the earth, sprung from its soil, nourished on its fruits and animals,, dependent on it for their very existence, as well as for their social, moral, and intellectual development. All knowledge, as well as all life, as far as we are concerned, grows out of the earth. Without it we should not know, for we should not be. Everything we feel, everything we do, everything we are, is conditioned by our relations to the Great Mother of whom and from whom we live. Therefore it seems to me that geography, the study of the earth, is the beginning of the study of life. "This study has the advantage over most others that it brings the learner at once into contact with realities. To do that, however, it must be pursued intelligently and in a practical manner from the outset. It is possible so to teach it that the pupil feels he is dealing with palpable objects and solid, concrete things, not merely with words and symbols and diagrams. For the geographical teacher can proceed from the known to the unknown, from the familiar to the remote, and is not compelled, like his mathematical and linguistic colleagues, to begin with abstractions and formulae, or mere appeals to the memory and industry. He may, if he pleases, start from the rudimentary but actual knowledge which the pupil possesses. "If I had a class of young boys or girls making their first acquaintance with geography I should not, to start with, trouble them with the Nile and the Amazon and the capes of Asia or tho Balkan capitals. I should begin much nearer home, as near home as possible.

"My first lessons would deal with the streets of their own town, the roads and fields about their own village. I should make them know as much as they could conveniently learn about these localities, and should Avork outwards and onwards from them. There is certainly a railway in or near the place, and probably a river, both of them familiar objects to the child. What is that railway for? Where does it come from before it reaches our town, and wher« does it go after it leaves us?

"The pupil has heard that it will take you, say. to London or to Manchester. I should tell him what London and Manchester are, give him some idea as to their distance from us, let him see why it is that we must be joined up by rails and trains with these great cities. I sttould do the same thing with our river. I should show him how it comes down to us out of the hills, and runs away from us to tlr:- sea, bearing off the ships that he has watched unloading at the wharfs. "Gradually the image of our country would sink into his mind, and he would visualise Britain as an island, connected with all the world by the highways and byways of the sea. He would have some consciousness of its natural and economic diversities. He would have discovered that the little hills he has seen en h ; s half holiday walks are. but the outworks of greater hills that swell into the backbone range which is the watershed of the river that runs under the town bridges and takes in the brook where he has fished for minnows; or that the miles of flat streets all about him have grown up because the railway brings the coal and iron ore to the factories, whose clanging hammers and roaring furnaces he hears daily on his way to school. "I would present him with a map then, and let him view it, not as a thing of flat surfaces and chequered tints, but as a picture of England, an England of hill and dale and green plain and crowded towns and nestling billages and meadowland and cornfields and smoking chimneys and palaces and workshops, fringed all round by yellow sand and shingle beaches beaten by the surges of the sea. Incidentally, and without effort, he would have learnt that there are some -10.000,000 men women and children living in this area, that about a sixth of them are in and around london, that the biggest hill of his own southern group is only a third or a quarter the height of the topmost summit of Wales. "Then I would take him through then through Asia, Africa, and America. I would use ihe map sparingly, and the photograph and (I hope) the school cinema a great deal. France, Italy, Switzerland, India would be something more to

him than irregular polygons, coloured pink or green, and dotted over with unintelligible names. I would like him to see Alpine glaciers and snow fields, Italian vineyards, Indian bazaars, Chicago skyscrapers, Australian sheet) runs, (ramp steamers wallowing through the Pacific or plunging round the Horn, those steamers he has already seen loading up and discharging on the quays of the Tyne and Thames. I would get him to visualise the whole earth as the home of men, all engaged in their diverse activities, all more or less associated with one another. Then I would introduce him to the 'use of the globes.' I would show him, on as larce a globe as I could get, the round earth as a whole. "Now, when a child has spent some two or three years learning all this, and always interested in the fascinating knowledge he acquires, what else is there he cannot learn? I venture to assert that he has laid the foundations of a large and liberal education."