17— SOME UNDERLYING EDUCATIONAL AIMS IN 

 SOUTH AFRICA. 



By W. E. C. Clarke, M.A. 



Amidst the variety and conflict of interests tliat tends to sunder 

 and keep apart tlie different States of this sub-continent, it is pleasing 

 to know that Education is a field in which all sections can find common 

 ground and recognise common purposes and common difficulties. 



This short paper does not pretend to deal with all these points, 

 but only to mention a few that have obtruded themselves on the 

 attention of the writer during moments of leisure, amid the rush of 

 the everyday detail of educational administration. There has been 

 much legislative activity within recent years, in all the colonies, in 

 the direction of devising an organised system to supersede the arrange- 

 ments which, in disconnected and tentative fashion, had come into 

 being, or been provisionally recognised, to meet the urgency of a 

 common want. Throughout the whole of South Africa, it may now 

 be said, that elementary education, and, to a lesser extent, secondary 

 education, have been brought under the sweep of a settled plan ; and 

 there is a prospect that before long arrangements will be devised to 

 meet the claims of higher education, in which all the countries of 

 South Africa will be asked to bear a share and take a common interest. 

 All this seems to be making for a systematic control of the machinery 

 of education on common lines, and to be paving the way in one 

 direction, for that political unity and federation, the attainment of 

 which has come sensibly nearer through recent events. 



It is not, however, with the formal organisation of education, 

 that I now propose to deal, but rather, with some common aspects 

 of the subject, which codes cannot cover and which those interested 

 in education must feel to be vitally important as affecting the under- 

 lying aim of the teacher and the resultant spirit and habit of mind 

 developed in the taught. 



I would propose to divide these aspects roughly into the 

 intellectual, the cesthetic, and — for want of a better name — the ideal, 

 and to touch on one or two points under each heading. 



The Intellectual. 



Under this head, one has to take into account the force of what 

 the ordinary man of the South African world would call " practical 

 considerations," the claim that the form of education, the balance of 

 subjects, and the length of school life must subserve the future career 

 of the young learner from the " practical " and money-earning point 

 of view. The doctrine that " man shall not live by bread alone," has 

 little hold on the majority of -people here, and the cult of " Athena 

 Agoraria " (the goddess of the market) — to whom Ruskin says the 

 English people " devote nine-tenths of their property and six-sevenths 

 of their time," — claims with us frequently an even larger proportion 

 of each. " Is there anv monev in it ? " or " Wat zal ik krij ? " is 



