6m, — In your issue of September 19th Miss Noel Streatfeild begins
heir article with a question: whether the children of one generation differ fundamentally from those of another. I think not, but at the present day there is so much limelight cast upon their lives that one is apt to overlook the basic similarities.
The chief source of blame for lack of originality. Is no doubt our present system of education, which is built on the principle of pro- ducing only "pegs, square or round, but still pegs, not a generation of human beings. Everything in schools is subordinated to examinations, every career is entered only by examination, and for these examinations certain strictly-adhered-to lines of study are laid down, the little embryo peg being severely pruned of 9ny latent side-shoots. It had begun by 1914. I well remember in my last year of school being compelled, not without tears, to abandon cherished plans for languages, ancient and modern, as in none of them, except Latin, at that time com- pulsory, was I sufficiently advanced to take them in the London Matric., then looming bleakly on my educational horizon. This was a new departure for my school, which up to then had given its girls a very liberal education. But the infection of exam fever had begun to spread, and it has never ebbed. I have not ceased to regret that abandoning of languages for the misery of mathematics, a life-long closed book to me. Many of my generation must have been in the same plight—how many more of this generation I
That last year can be near-heaven. A child is past the forcible- feeding stage, and has begun to know his likes and dislikes, to visualise ambitions. But in 1952 we force him into stereotyped exams and kill all originality stone-dead—stone-dead at last after prolonged slow torture lasting from the time he began school.
Is not the discouragement given to youthful original minds that try to diverge from the main current into pleasant backwaters and eddies the reason for the plodding copyist efforts of the many competitors Miss Streatfeild deplores ?
I think children with country homes where, in these days of no governesses and few servants, their amusements are left to their own organisation, are inclined to be more enterprising than the town-bred children. That has been my experience. There is less television and more self-reliance; but even there lies danger. The busy parent buys the children a pony, and thinks that will keep them amused indefinitely. Too often it does, and there is bred that dreadful pot-hunting child Which frequents every gymkhana, horse-show and competition within reach, intent with that terrible single-mindedness, or one-track- mindedness, of childhood on only one thing, the greater glory of itself and its pony. For let us be frank; children are naturally one- track-minded unless given plently of encouragement to vary their interests, and from one-track-mindedness to lack of an original mind is a very short step, made easier by " peg-making " education.
You will often find that a large family with a small income, its mem- bers dependent on themselves for their own amusements, will produce more original minds than a small family mentally coddled by parents who give the children too much attention.
The Americans can teach us a lesson with their holiday camps for the very young, with opportunities for learning self-reliance out of doors, and the custom for the older ones of working at a variety' of jobs in the long vacation. The Americans encourage more freedom of thought for the individual. Their standard of work may not com- pare so favourably with ours, age for age, but it seems to produce a more all-round open mind than our cramping System of peg-production.
Dunlichity Lodge, By Inverness, Scotland.
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