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PERTH, WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 4, 1944.
NO. 9,148.
SEVENTY-FIRST YEAR.
A LECTURE TO THE CATHOLIC TEACHERS' GUILD BY HUGH GOERKE
.
. Has Education
fallen. Too Much Into the Hands of Specialists?
How Exclusiveness Led to Australia's Greatest Literary Hoax Common Men May Help the Expert to Maintain a Right Perspective In opening to -night, I feel I must offer some defence of my right to be here at all, talking to members of a Teachers' Guild. I am not, I am happy to say, a specialist on the sub-
intention of excluding from them any meaning or merit whatever. Thus in a quotation from one of the poems"Swamps. marshes, borrow-pits and other areas of stagnant waters serve as breeding grounds. . ."
ject of education. Indeed I think, Now judging from the theories of education emanating from Bishop Burgmann and have I found you, my Anopheles!" his possessive wife, from Bertrand Rus- The first three lines are taken direct from an American official report on the sell, from Neill, from Professor Dewey (not to be confused with the Presi- breeding of mosquitos. United One might have thought that this dential candidate in the States, whose views on education I do might have thrown the critics into a not know i that education has fallen state of confusion, but I understand that an American poet, Harry Roskol1,..0 much into the hands of specialists. Nor for that matter does such an ob- cnko, who had been unfortunate servation merely apply to the subject enough to include some of the poems of education. in the American magazine, "Voices," claimed that the hoaxers had hoaxed A few months ago, and it has been half by writing poetry of which themselves so well publicised that I am ashamed to mention it again, there was they could be proud. The poets, howrevealed in the press what has been ever, stick to their story that their intermed Australia's greatest literary tention was to find out whether "those hoax. The background to it was set who write and praise so lavishly cerin Adelaide, where a rather exclusive tain forms of modern writing could group of litterateurs, led by Mr. Max tell the real product from deliberateHarris, of the Adelaide University, ly concocted nonsense." have for some time been producing a This is a typical example of the specliterary magazine known as "Angry tacle of the specialist who has lost the Penguins," as well as -various other efHe is often inclined ommon touch. fusions which were mainly distinguish- as a result of an intensive training to ed by their complete incomphehensi- take too restricted a view, to be as it bility. To say that such lack of clar- were too close to his subject, and by o. was a defect in their work was way of the opening gambit of my demerely an open !Imitation to be de- fence for being here to -night, I may scribed as being unprogressive and say that it often takes an unintelligent otherwise utterly unrefined in the deep- layman to come along and ask a few er psychic processes. intelligent or at least pertinent quesSome time ago this group hailed as tions. This matter of the exclusiveness of a new literary star and published the works of one Ern Malley, whose poems, the specialist calls to mind the,experithey said, indicated that he must be ence of G. K. Chesterton, who was set "a poet of tremendous power working down in the midst of a group of Camthrough a disciplined and restrained bridge dons. to whom he proceeded to kind of statement into the deepest read a paper. I do not mean to imAmong ply that he had not been invited to wells of human experience." those who flocked to the shrine of this read the paper, and that it was merenew giant of contemporary Australian ly his passion for controversy which poetry was Mr. Brian Elliott, who a told him that here was too good an opportunity to miss, but what was queried few years ago was lecturer in English in the University of Western Australia. was his right as a mere journalist to Then came the revelation that the have written a Short History of EngSuch impertinence particularly entire set of poems had been written land. in one afternoon as a hoax by two pained the eminent historian, G. C. Sydney poets, Sergeant McAuley and Coulton, who himself has gone to corporal Stewart, with the deliberate great pains to soak himself in the past .
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speak, is evident in many fields of specialised endeavour, When 'people tend to go off on some track of their own, and gradually to lose sight of the general purpose of their efforts, and perhaps even to cease to be concerned as to whether what they are doing has any real purpose at all. I hope then that-as specialists, though not, of course, of the 'type I have referred to, you will not resent my clumsiness if, like the elephant, I poke my head into the room and ask education -for what? Because education is both purposive and dogmatic. I cannot refrain from this on again quoting Chesterton point, because he is, as Frank Sheen said recently, so eminently quotable. Indeed Father Ronald Knox once remarked that he had carefully thought over and written many things, and then usually found that G.K.C. had already expressed them very much bet. ter than he. Various experts in the field speak at odd times as if education were nor dogmatic; they seem to that the word has something to -"it is my privilege to lead him tItink through common ways, pointing out do with the Dark Ages, forgetting (or through having attended a perhaps, objects." elephants and other enormous secular school, never having learnt) it was in the Dark Ages that the with apparently the sole determination that Church held the lamp of learning and of discrediting the Church of Rome culture firmly aloft. Leave the child Now you and all her connections. to himself, they say, and he will find will admit. I think, that when an or,out the things he can do best ,or at dinary person questions what you say you may endure an uncomfortable mo- east will do what he likes, and if ment or two, but it will be nothing perchance he does what other people to the dismay you will experience, in don't like, he will learn in time that, these days of the veneration of the in their own jargon. he has been guilty specialist, when one of that chosen of anti -social behaviour. Education, company questions your right to say they say. is the development of certain innate abilities .in the child. On anything at all. At least Chesterton said it caused this point, Chesterton had this to say him gravely. to ponder the whole sub- and perhaps, as teachers, you may be ject of the position of the frivolous interested if I quote in extenso: "I know that certain crazy pedants amateur, and he replied in the press to the effect that he was quite willing have attempted to counter this diffito admit that not only Mr. Coulton, culty by maintaining that education is but everyone else in Cambridge, was not instruction at all. They present It re- the process as coming not from outfar more learned than he. mained, however, that it was often the side, from the teacher, hut entirely privilege of the layman to point out. from inside the boy, Education, they to the specialist engaged, and proper- say,. is the Latin for leading out or ly so, in intensive research, such little drawing out the dormant faculties of matters as the fact that the house in each person. Somewhere far down in the dim boyish soul is a primordial which he is working i1 on fire, or that poking his yearning to learn Greek accents or to an escaped elephant is wear clean collars: and the schoolhead through the sky -light, or such other interesting objects as may have master only gently and tenderly libAnd, continued erates this imprisoned purpose. Sealed escaped attention, Chesterton, "it is precisely because I up in the new-born babe are the intrinsic secrets of how to eat asparaam so much less learned than he, that it is my privilege to lead him through gus and what was the date of Bannockburn. The educator only draws common ways, pointing out elephants out the child's own unapparent love and other enormous objects." (Continued on Page 4.) This lack of perspective, of which I
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