Staff service - 15 Jan 1957

Let us hear the story in the Gospel for last Sunday which we shall soon hear read. The child Jesus, now 12 years old, was taken by his parents to Jerusalem for the annual feast of the Passover. When the time came to go, the boy was missing. Eventually he was found in the midst of the doctors, both hearing them and asking them questions. The boy was shrewd enough to ask questions and the teachers were patient in their answers. He in turn was eager to listen to them as they were prepared to talk. Here is the real clue to education – a natural and fruitful interchange between the minds of the teacher and the pupil. There are many questions that arise in the mind of the growing child as he sees life and the world around him. Education becomes real when the teachers are ready and able to answer the questions.

This leads us at once to ask the questions, What is education for? What is its purpose?

The answer, I suggest, is threefold.

In the first place, I would say that the purpose of education is to make learning possible – to equip for learning. A carpenter or an engineer or a housewife, or for that matter any one undertaking a job of work, can do his job only if he is equipped with the proper set of tools. The same is true of all learning. The ability to read, the ability to write and the ability to deal with figures – our old friends the 3 R’s – are not education itself. They are the tools that make education possible and therefore they have to be mastered. For the child this is the most difficult thing of all, because in and by themselves they are intrinsically dull. So this is a matter which requires sympathy and patience on the part of the teacher, the cooperation of the parents and application from the scholar. Some of us teaching in classes lower down are dealing mostly with this type of education all the time. Let us realise the importance of the work we are doing. A student’s success in his higher studies is largely determined by the way he masters the 3 R’s. It requires utter consecration on our part to sympathise with the students in their difficulties and help them on with patience and tact.

I have described this type of work – teaching the students to master the 3 R’s – as one that is rather dull. Not many men – I will not say women – are content to do this type of work for a long time. But for a man who has dedicated himself to his work, no type of work need be uninteresting. I am reminded of our friend, C.E.Jell whom some of you will remember as your teacher in this place. He taught the boys in the 4 th Standard to read and write the English language with great success throughout his long period of service in this place. When the

Principal once suggested to Jell that for a change he might take the 5 th Standard he protested and insisted on his continuing with his 4 th Standard. We would say how dull it is to go on with the same type of work, year after year, particularly in the lower classes. But Jell thoroughly enjoyed his work to the very end. His chief interest in work was in the boys who came to him year after year. Every year a new set of boys came to him. He paid individual attention, particularly to the weak ones and his joy was in seeing the progress made by them day by day. Though his work throughout was in equipping the students with the tools education, he also succeeded in bringing his personality into contact with those of the pupils, teaching them good habits and discipline. His pupils even to this day remember him with affection and veneration. His was a life consecrated entirely to his work. Mastery of the 3 R’s is the first stage in a student’s education.

Then comes the development of real interest in knowledge, and so the possibility of learning something of accumulated human experience. The development of real interest in knowledge is an aim we must have before us not only in our classroom work, but in all our activities, both in class and outside – in all our clubs and societies, in all our contact with our pupils. This is not a job which is just done at school. The home, the church, the club – all can and must cooperate at every point. It is not something which is finished when we leave school; it is something that goes on throughout life. Our interest in knowledge must go on developing, and we must continue to learn from the experience of others. Our work as teachers will be counted successful only if we have so stimulated the mind of the child that he wants to go on learning in whatever situation he finds himself. I think it is still widely believed that education means acquiring a lot of facts. I think we must remind ourselves constantly that information is not the same as education. Our task as teachers is to make the students think for themselves. Even if our only aim in our teaching is to produce good examination results, we will do well to give every opportunity to the boys to think for themselves and do things on their own. It is in this way we can stimulate the mind of the child and make him to develop a real interest in knowledge and in learning.

Now we come to the third thing, the most important of all. Acquiring the desire for knowledge has to be fitted into a framework of a right outlook, a right attitude to life and living. There are scientists who confine their studies to one branch of the subject and they try to discover everything that can be known about that particular subject. That is considered to be truly academic education.

There is no attempt to find out the relation of one branch of knowledge to another. An important aspect of any education is the fitting in of all known facts into some system, into some philosophy. Instead of having knowledge in various compartments we must be able to fit them into one whole system of thought. We must be able to relate facts in order to understand their significance and to answer the questions which they raise. For example, do we learn Science to kill or to cure, to destroy or to help mankind? Do we acquire knowledge to gain power over our fellows or to serve humanity? I think it is true to say that every school is imparting to its students somekind of philosophy, some kind of attitude to life whether consciously defined or not. No school can help imparting some philosophy even if it is the crude material one of getting on at all costs, something purely selfish and completely antisocial.

There is something distinctive about the Christian approach to life and its problems. Our schools have been founded to fit in all knowledge imparted here into that framework of a Christian attitude to life and living. It is recognised by all that our urgent need today is that our pupils must be helped to develop a religious outlook and attitude to life by all our teaching and activity. It is in that way that we can master the materialistic and secular philosophy one frequently meets in our society.

Herein lies the great responsibility of the teacher. It is by personal contact with the teacher that the pupils get the right outlook and the right attitude to life. This is an aspect of our work to which we must pay attention. Everybody carries about with him a philosophy of life, an interpretation of the nature and duty of man, whether or not he has defined it to himself. Even agnosticism, in spite of what its name suggests, is a philosophy, a dogma. In our reading, we shall consciously or perhaps unconsciously, express that philosophy of life. It will speak in spite of us. It will radiate out of us operating for good or ill, noble or base. There are certain assumptions, dogmas, scales of values, attitudes that express themselves in us in all that we say or do. When we think of the men and women who taught us, what we love to recall about them is not what they told us, but what they were. It is not the subject they taught us that we remember but what they believed, and in believing expressed about life and man’s part in it.

Realising the greatness of the task to which God has called us as teachers, let us dedicate ourselves afresh at the beginning of this new year and pray that God may forgive us our past shortcomings and failures and use us more and more for the furtherance of his purpose for the world.