Some Reflections on Secondary Education

SOME REFLECTIONS ON SECONDARY EDUCATION I F. CLARKE I PROPOSE to offer here a few "flying thoughts" rather than any planned and pegged-down expo_siti~n of the whole vast problem of secondary education tn the modern world. While it is true, no doubt, that profound changes ·in our conceptions of its aims and methods will take place, the nature of these changes is still obscure. Mankind, in General Smuts's phrase, may, indeed, be striking its tents again, but the direction of the march is even less clear than it seemed to be fifteen years ago, when we were all quite sure that President Wilson was pointing the way. The obscurity is due not only to the fact of our present economic plight and the distorting effect that our struggles have on our long-range thinking; it is due also to real bewilderment) which may well be intensified rather than relieved by the passing of the "depression.'·' We are in the trough between an Age of Faith that has gone and the next one that has yet to be. So all our syntheses to-day are apt to be provisional and fleeting; Social Democracy yesterday, the Nazis to-day, and who knows what to-morrow? The parallel with the Greek world into which Plato came, or still better, with the Roman world into which Christianity came, is striking enough. If the parallel is real, if our present condition really resembles one of these, the . hope of a Golden Age soon to come may be less well grounded than the probability of a new Dark Age of confusion and disintegration,.. with a few "monastic" centres of culture preserving the guarantee of a new dawn. Those who can believe with such facility and optimism .6] THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY in the speedy coming of a new Golden Age should tell us, more clearly and completely than they have yet done, what is to be the faith that will provide the driving power and the cohesion which are indispensable to such a condition. To many of.us, unmistakable signs of a new crystallization are· not easy to find. The patching up of a workable economic concordat an1ong the nations and the return of a state of gay irresponsibility called "Prosperity /' will merely mean that the real problem will face .us more nakedly than ever. Economic crises, prolonged as they may seem, are short and sharp compared with the long-drawn-au~ confusions·and despairs of the crises of culture. And when our subject is education, it is vital to recognize, at the outset, that a crisis of culture is what we are now concerned with. No doubt education, if we know what we mean by it, will be a guide for mankind through the tangle that ]ies ahead. But if we are to make effective use of such a . liberating agent, some fundamental re-thinking will have to be done. It is vain and childish, and even blind, to assume, as many do, that· we have only to continue · more intensively and with more eager "boost," what we have been doing in the past. Sheer growth in numbers and expenditure, so far from being "progress," might well be a calamity now, if there has been no thorough-·going reconsideration of ruling values and objectives. A na1ve and almost juvenile optimism of this kind is all too apparent in much of the discussion that is going on in the United 'States to-day, and signs of it are not absent in Canada. Nor is it enough to alter tactics without reconsidering strategy. To judge from the most recent pronunciamento of American leaders in educational thought,* this is what *W. H. Kilpatrick (ed.), Tlte Educational Frontier, New York, 1933. 68 REFLECTIONS ON SECONDARY EDUCATION is proposed. The ne-w enemy that calls for a change of front is an evil "Economic System,'' which, with its stress on personal 'gain and profit-making, is the devil that corrupts the purity of otherwise innocent democracy. So the front ·is to be changed and tactics are to be redirected towards this quarte,r, and the fi_ght is to be won by the most widespread cultivation of...