60 Timehri. 



the elementary school is to lay the basis, on sound general principles, of 

 an aptitude which will later be of avail in practical application to the 

 work and duties of the citizen in individual, in family, and in corporate 

 life. 



It will be well for the educational statesman to bear always 

 very clearly in mind this dominant reason for corporate organisation of 

 education, that efficiency in living is a corporate advantage. The State 

 has no concern in improving the social status of the individual, nor in 

 enabling him to earn more, still less in opening a door for him to pass 

 from one Social class to another higher in the scale, but it has a concern in 

 increasing the aptitude of each individual for service within the social 

 economy. Confusion of these very separate and distinct ends has led to 

 many of the complications of educational systems now in vogue, and in 

 nothing is this confusion more evident than in the concessions of educa- 

 tional authority to the demands of the many for a curriculum in no 

 respect specially adapted to the production of general efficiency, even the 

 conventional value of which is, like the value of precious stones, dis- 

 sipated as soon as it becomes more than the possession of the few. 



The local educational question may well be reviewed from the 

 platform of the principles we have been considering. The varying 

 race characteristics are further accentuated by varying conditions of 

 life which it is not in the power of the Government immediately 

 to change, but which it is in its power to ameliorate or the reverse 

 by suitable schooling or unsuitable. So far as native Indian schools 

 are concerned the present codes are absoluetly condemned by those 

 who know anything of the conditions in which the . life of the 

 Buck is to be lived. So far the result of white man's organisation 

 has in his eas-* been simply negative. The codes have helped to 

 suppress the artistic faculties native to the race by ignoring their exis- 

 tence in the instruction given which, if it has an aim, is intended to 

 cultivate a literary cast of mind the materials for the satisfaction of which 

 are not to be found in the bush. Partly through ignorance and partly by 

 shirking the difficulties of a separate organisation the activities of vital 

 worth in a forest life are. ignored, and absolutely irrelevant subjects, 

 absurdly inapplicable, industriously drilled into the innocent papooses. 

 There is for example no divine educational virtue in needlework that it 

 should shoulder out, in our school system, instruction in native cotton- 

 spinning, an art much more useful to the inhabitant of the interior By 

 a similar perversity the East Indian child with no aptitude for the Occi- 

 dental gamut, has vigorously pounded into him songs in a scale foreign to 

 his ear, with words gent rally so ridiculously exotic that they bear for him 

 neither meaning nor interest. You may succeed in changing his nice 

 native dress for nasty European clothing, but you can't change his aural 

 apparatus. The hideous cacophony of the mixed school singing lesson 

 might convince even a tone-blind inspector. 



The same criticism applies, so far as the words of the school songs 

 go, to their use for the children of all races in the colony. That nemesis 



