How?

"All that a child was guaranteed by our own Education Act of 1877 was a grounding in a narrow range of formal subjects and that only up to Std. 6."

"Arithmetic . . . was intensively drilled and took up about a third of a child's school life . . . geography was apt to be little more than the memorising of strings of capes and bays, mountains, rivers, lakes and capitals; and since a typical prescription in history began the succession of Houses and Sovereigns from 1066 A.D. to 1485 A.D.,' there was every suggestion that this subject was treated in a similar way."

Is the achievement of that sort of knowledge the aim or education?

The child who sat hour after hour being drilled and bludgeoned and "disciplined" into memorising fact after fact certainly came out of school filled to the measured mark with knowledge—little of which had any relation to his future life as a citizen or to his personal needs as a human being, The very term "standard" implied a preconceived notion, arbitrarily decided, of what the child was capable of doing or profiting from. Worse still, the primitive psychology of the times insisted on fitting the child to the system. (See the cartoon reproduced in the front of A. E. Campbell's "Educating New Zealand.") The system seemed to be aiming at turning out the largest possible number of walking encyclopaedias. Instead of starting with an a priori, assumption of the child's needs, modern educational psychology starts by studying the child, first, and then evolves the system to fit the facts.