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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 78
A Wrong Ideal
A Wrong Ideal.
For myself, I am not a man of science like Dr King, and so may claim the right to be reasonably inaccurate in matters of fact. Accordingly I venture to point to sixty-five (I think they are sixty-five) solid facts listed on page twenty-one of my last report (a copy is at anyone's disposal who wishes it). The sixty-five facts are the sixty-five University junior scholars. Add three for last year, and that will make a total of sixty-eight scholars from our school in thirty-four years. Of these, to the best of my knowledge, three are dead (not a large mortality in thirty-four years), one is with Dr King, and there remain sixty-four. Then these sixty-four, I venture to say, take them for all in all, from Mr Saul Solomon at the top to the fledgelings who left the nest last year at the bottom, they are as vigorous, useful, and sane a set of men as you will be likely to find the British Empire over. Why, they are the cream of the community. But turn to the previous page and you will find the creme de la creme—our forty-five duxes, three dead (a small bill of mortality, though enough), and none of them in need of Dr King's skill, thank God! Among them you will find men eminent in all the fields of colonial activity—in law, in medicine, in the church, in the teaching profession, on the Press, and in the Civil Service. Dr King may pick out the "wastrels" for arguments; he is welcome to all he can find. If I may reason from my forty-five facts as Dr King from his two, I should say to any boy who asked my advice: If you want to be long-lived, Sonny, strong-limbed, gound-winded, levelheaded, sane, in short, in mens and corpus, what you have to do is to come and be dux of the Boys' High School.
Regarded from any point of view, I find it difficult to conceive anything more unfitting for the responsible headmaster of a school to say to his pupils. The premises are not correct, and there are no sufficient grounds for the conclusion arrived at, which, moreover, is erroneous. It is entirely in keeping with the whole trend of the rector's long and elaborate defence of a system which he admits is inseparable from overpressure for examination purposes. How can it be expected that boys will refrain from cramming when the "be-all and end-all set before them is the winning of prizes and distinctions? What conclusion could any High School lad come to after reading the rector's views as elaborately stated and restated by himself in several issues of the 'Star,' but that the only essential thing for a boy to do at school is to set to work to win prizes and to get his name placed for ever on a roll of immortals. He would be carried away by his master's enthusiasm, and would assume that it was a natural and proper thing to overwork and cram for examination purposes, and to "get a good deal fagged," as the rector puts it, in the process, "seeing that there are holidays in the year that relieve the pressure." Mr Wilson should know that a boy cannot make up during the vacation all that he would lose at school under the system he advocates. He should realise that pressure on the intellectual faculties (especially excessive strain put on the memory, which Professor Bain holds to be "the most costly of all the processes of the intelligence as regards the claim for nourishment), whether in or out of school, without plenty of daily open-air exercise, stunts the development of the whole system, and with it the growth of the brain. He could ascertain this checking of development with very little trouble by examining his pupils at the beginning and end of each vacation.