E.— GEOGRAPHY 



135 



we are a conservative people ; so that many folk seem to think what 

 was good enough for St. Augustine ought to be good enough for us ! 



This is perhaps the main reason why so many of our schools still give 

 the lion's share of their time to the acquisition of an inadequate knowledge 

 of the Latin language. Latin is, of course, of small importance in helping 

 the average man to-day to pass on to other subjects which he really needs. 

 Be it understood that the Latin and Greek languages should, in my opinion, 

 most certainly be studied in the universities for the same reasons that we 

 study Anglo-Saxon and other sources of our language, and to the same 

 extent. There is no need to learn Greek to understand Greek philosophy. 



Would that the classical protagonist realised the real value of the Greek 

 education as taught by Aristotle, and would encourage its adaptation to 

 modern times. Plato and Aristotle in 350 B.C. did not occupy the in- 

 valuable time of their students by wearisome repetition of the vocabularies 



" EDUCATION ' )()^\ 



eoi^rt re? 



which mosroj-jVcfe 

 ftu&rrolia ^ 



The World of Today 



or* 



Lahn of aOOOj;ear--5 ogo €? q-p 



FiG. 18. — A knowledge of the fundamentals of modern culture is far more vital 

 to the youth of to-day than studies which have survived since the days of 

 St. Augustine. 



of the Egyptians, from whom the Greeks derived much of their culture ; 

 or of folk-tales written in some foreign language two thousand years before 

 their date. They trained youth to deal intelligently with existing conditions. 

 We may not all agree with the scathing words of a well-known writer 

 (E. D. Martin), who states that culture did not mean for the Greeks 

 ' the accumulation of dead and inconsequential knowledge, the only 

 purpose of which was a pedantic display of erudition ' (Martin 1926) ; but 

 we must suit our education to the twentieth century. 



We must train our young folk to deal intelligently (i.e. scientifically) 

 with existing conditions. It will be of interest to draw from my own 

 teaching experience in this connection in Australia, Chicago and Canada. 

 In the former continent we see six million Anglo-Saxons living in a hot 

 arid continent with an environment resembling North Africa and quite 

 unlike any portion of Europe, not to mention the British Isles (Fig. 18). 

 Bordering the Commonwealth on the North are 300 million Indians, 

 400 million Chinese and 60 million Japanese. The empire of the last 

 reaches to the borders of Australasia. Yet it is safe to say that the students 

 in the better schools, as I knew them in Sydney, learned little or nothing 



