Educational Ideals

EDUCATIONAL IDEALS AN ADDRESS BY THE RIGHT HONOURABLE STANLEY BALDWIN, P.C., M.P., ETC., PRIME MINISTER OF GREAT BRITAIN. (Links of Empire Series) 6 August, 19,27

MR. BALDWIN was the guest of honour at a joint meeting of the Canadian and Empire Clubs of Toronto, and the chair was occupied by MAJOR J. E. NORSEWORTHY, President of the Canadian Club, who introduced the Speaker in the following words:

We are signally honoured today by the presence of the Prime Minister of Great Britain. We speak of Britain as our Mother Country not merely because the parents of many of us were born there, but because our form of Government is modelled after that of Great Britain, and we are accustomed to look to her for leadership in social and political development, as well as in religion, education, art and journalism. In industry and commerce, we are inevitably brought into close and constant touch with the United States and it is worthy of note that in these other vitally important matters, in spite of geography, we still receive our main inspiration from the old land. That being the case it is a most happy event that the leader in English public life should have made time to pay Canada a visit, and we are delighted as well as highly honoured to welcome him here today. We have all admired Mr. Baldwin, from afar, as the type of statesman who has made the name of the British Government respected and trusted all over the world. In a recent address to a London guild, Mr. Baldwin is reported to have said-" In these days you stand for one of the greatest things in the world-honest craftsmanship." And a journalist commenting on the address wrote-"Perhaps the whole character of Mr. Baldwin is revealed in his appeal for 'honest craftsmanship'." The list of Mr. Baldwin's engagements indicates that his seventeen days in Canada will be no holiday tour. I don't suppose even a Prime Minister can make speeches without effort, or travel rapidly in hot weather without discomfort. We appreciate what Mr. Baldwin is doing for us in making this trip and assure him that it will do much to help us overcome the disadvantage of being three thousand miles from the centre of the Empire.

I have the greatest pleasure in introducing to you the Right Honourable Stanley Baldwin.

MR. BALDWIN who was warmly received, spoke as follows: Gentlemen, I shall always remember this occasion as the first one in Canada at which I have not been told that I am here for a vacation. I am here, as I have said in other places, merely as an interpreter of England to you and, I trust, later of you to England; and I would like, before I get on the subject on which I propose to address you for a short time this afternoon, to tell you what I hope may interest a Toronto audience, that I always take a holiday on one Saturday in the year and go down to Henley, and there I meet all the men of the British rowing world, many of whom are old friends of my own; and everyone I saw that Saturday was full of praise of your Joe Wright (Applause). as one of the best scullers and cleanest sportsmen that ever came across. And I don't think I am betraying any confidence when I tell you what one or two of these old oarsmen told me. They said they did not believe it possible that whichever of the two men, Joe Wright or David Collett, had won that heat on the Thursday could have 'survived in the final because they said it was the most wonderful race ever seen at Henley or anywhere else, and that the winner could not, whoever he was, have had enough physical strength left in him to win the race on the Saturday. I do not know whether Joe Wright would have agreed with that. We all felt his sculling was a thing worth coming a long way to see.

Now, I have made two or three speeches at gatherings like this, and spoken on two or three different aspects of life in England, partly in the hope that it might interest my audiences and partly in the hope that something I might say might be of use to you in dealing with your manifold problems, which are in some ways like and in many ways different from our own; and when I come into Ontario I feel I should like to make my main theme -and I hope you won't think it a very dull one-the subject of education. Because Ontario has always taken the lead in education, we are enormously interested to see how she is grappling with her problems. She is famous for her schools, and in Toronto famous for her university and her colleges.

I don't know whether I am right in thinking that it may be largely due to the fact that among the early settlers in Ontario you had perhaps a full proportion of Scotsmen, and though I am an Englishman I have always recognized that it is to the love of education in Scotland, which existed I am afraid long before it became really popular in England, that the success of Scotsmen both in the British Isles and abroad is so largely due. I will be as brief as I can about England, but I just want you to realize that we have between five and six million children in our primary schools, and we keep them there now to the age of 14. It is a very difficult problem to know how to make the best use of these last years of life in primary school. We are experimenting in various directions, but you have got to get an education that will fit not only the child of great ability but the ordinary child and the child that is called the stupid child who very often is the child who makes good later on.

It is much easier to deal with in the towns than in the country. England, if you get outside the big towns, is what I believe you are-essentially a country of small schools. Forty percent. of our schools contain 100 scholars or less, and you may be surprised to hear that, in a country so densely populated as we are. The village school holds a prominent place in rural life. The difficulty of dealing with it is staffing and accommodation because generally the teacher has to deal, often with an inadequate staff, with 50 to 100 children ranging from 5 to 14 years of age.

In secondary education our problem is this : I don't know whether it has been the case with you, but the one happy result of the war has been to stimulate in England itself a real interest in education such as never existed before, and the real proof of that is the way people have come tumbling over one another to get a secondary and university education. We have nearly double our scholars at secondary schools as between 1914 and last year. We have gone up from 180,000 to 342,000. Full-time students attending universities numbered about 20,000 before the war. The increase there is over 100 per cent., and it has now grown to 42,000.

Now, we are struggling in another direction which you have taken some interest in, and that is to get some kind of common life in the new universities where the college system, such as it is in Cambridge and Oxford, has not hitherto come into being. I believe in Toronto you have set a wonderful example with your Hart House, of which I have heard a great deal, and would like to hear more. We feel this to be important as it is to educate men from books,-an equally important part of their education is rubbing their brains up against one another,-and we do not want to turn out only lettered men but we want to turn out men with a knowledge of life.

And one other aspect of your university life has given me intense pleasure. Lately some of the best graduates from Canada are beginning to play their part in looking after those parts of the Empire where the white man goes often alone to teach, to educate and to bring along the more backward races of the Empire. There is no more self-sacrificing work, there is no finer work; and you see Canadians in the Sudan and in the colonial services, medical men, highly educated men in the civil service helping to bear the white man's burden, and I am old-fashioned enough to believe that it is not enough for a country to concentrate solely on a lot of money for itself. The real spiritual force comes into it when its sons are ready, as for generations Englishmen, Scotsmen and Irishmen have been ready, to give up the comforts of home life and go out on pioneer life and try to help people benefit from things that have benefitted others so much in the years past.

For the adult worker in England we have one or two associations well known to you. There is the Workers' Education Association, which I believe works on this side of the Atlantic. And every university and university college in the British Isles is now engaged in this work. Talking of university work, I want to pay special tribute--I could pay tribute, indeed, to your university here--a special tribute to your medical school. My medical friends tell me that Toronto is second to none in the whole world, and it is from Toronto that your Dr. Banting has presented the world with insulin. That being so, I am sure you will be interested to know that in England in the last 20 years, I should think, since we began it, we have been paying a great deal of attention to medical work in our primary schools. In a great industrial country like ours we soon came to, realize that the physical condition of our people was a matter of prime importance, and that it was waste of time and money in many cases to try and educate children who were not fit physically to benefit by that education. And so we have gone in for medical inspection from the earliest ages. From it a great deal of good has been derived-medical advice and medical health from infancy upward, and I can testify myself to the extraordinary improvement in the appearance of our children in the big towns that I have noticed for the last ten or twenty years-far healthier, far better looking, far better kept and better clad.

Now, there is one thing I want you always to bear in mind about Great Britain. It does not apply in the same way to you. You are younger than we are and you had the inestimable advantage of coming over and being able to make. a clean start. We could not do that, and industrialism came so quickly in our country, so quickly and swept over the land before we realized what was happening, with the discovery of mechanical inventions, it all swept over us before we realized what was happening. Industrialism, unfortunately, had a long, long start of education. Our compulsory system of education is younger than your Confederation: Your Confederation was three years old when we first had our elementary education act. We have made gigantic strides, but we had yet a great deal to do, and you will easily gather from what I said at the beginning of my observations that the greatest hope we have for our country is in the kindling of that real desire for education which is the only fruit of the war I can look on with satisfaction.

I know that many idealists expect too much, and expect it too quickly. The Minister of Education was complaining the other day that the habit of superficial reading in England was one of the diseases from which we suffer most. That may be true. It is not the fault of elementary education. I have never discovered that the habit of superficial reading was peculiar to any one class in the country. It is quite true, but I think there is more justice in this, that possibly our education is devoted too much to the preparation for professional and industrial careers, and we are apt to lose sight of the importance of education as an end in itself. If you regard education solely from the point of view of enabling you to earn a salary, useful as that may be, you miss one of the best things for which education stands, and also we suffer very much in England-I don't suppose you do, and if you did I would not criticise it-but we suffer very much in England from very clever physicians who are always prepared to prescribe for the body politic with a great deal of agility only equalled by their ignorance of human nature. (Laughter). These people in Europe are called the "intelligentsia", a very ugly word for a very ugly thing, but there is a cure for that; and the cure for the kind of education I have tried to describe is not less education, but more experience, and I rejoice to think that experience is not in the hands of schoolmasters to teach us. It is in the hands of Providence, which takes very good care we shall gain it.

There are some pessimists abroad, not in Canada, who think that democracy means the destruction of all culture. There is a very learned and very modern historian who has just written a long book to prove that the Roman Empire fell as soon as culture was brought to the masses, but I am much cheered to think that the writer is not only a Russian, but he wrote since the Revolution. The educational system of a democratic state should not only aim at levelling the mass upward as far as it can, but it should follow the example taught over 2,000 years ago by Plato that the Golden children of Iron parents should have their chance to soar away into the blue. Make the high road of learning wide, make it free to all who can walk, but don't prohibit motors or flying. I may confess here to men of a stock so largely English that our English intelligence is sometimes apt to be despised by nations that think they are quicker witted than we are. (Laughter and applause). Our most valuable real estate is our character, its steadiness, its reliability, its personal integrity, its capacity for toleration and, I may add, for a quiet, humorous boredom with things. The general strike in England, which was not without its alarming aspects, illustrated all these qualities in our people. (Applause). We have our defects. Some of them are serious, but I don't propose to discuss them away from home. (Laughter).

Now, I always maintain that the great service education renders to democracy is the same service that we hope to gain from religion. They work, or ought to work, hand in hand. It is to keep the moral weights and measures true to standard, and not only true to standard but true to the highest standards; and let us have them applied impartially to all members of the community from top to bottom. There are those who would empty the conception of state from all moral qualities and they would confine education to a bread and butter business. If I may paraphrase Nurse Cavell's dying words : "Such patriotism is not enough". Moral standards applied as I suggest are the surest way to achieve that fundamental, social unity which is postulated by democracy. It would dissolve the abuses of wealth, the empty parade of luxury, the power of the demagogue; and it might even, as we are approaching the millennium, curb the sensational press.

Your problems in Canada differ from ours in another way. It has been said that history is a time limit and geography a space circle. Our time limit is longer than yours; your space circle far wider than ours. We are overwhelmed by history, and you by geography. But in spite of that fundamental difference, the moral enterprises upon which as nations we are embarked are identical. You have, it is true, to build up your own spiritual values, the soul of your nation, with a powerful neighbor, a permeating neighbor, to the south of you. We in England have been called insulated. But our development has been profoundly affected by the proximity of the continent of Europe. We cannot escape European influence. We never had done that in our history. We lose and we gain by the proximity of great and influential civilizations. We have, indeed, had to remove our magnetic station at Greenwich lately because the enormous increase of the traffic in that neighborhood disturbed the instruments and deflected them from the true. You cannot move nations about. You cannot put them in a position of isolation from the rest of the world in which they may retain their own peculiar characteristics; and so far as I, a visitor, am able to judge, in modern Canada you are shaping your own destiny with a vigorous independence.

I do not propose to tell you of the evidence that makes me believe that. You know it, and you believe it yourselves, which is what really matters. But all the institutions of your public life are of the deepest interest to a man like myself who has to face, during his comparatively short term of office, problems of great magnitude, the solution of which might affect not only our own Islands but the destinies of the Empire. What I think one wants to look at in a nation to see signs of health are its civic morality, its administration of the law, the influence of the churches, the tone of its press, the freedom of its universities, and I would add last, but not least, the conduct of its sport. If these things are sound, then we may be happy and take courage.

Canada, too-and here I hope I am not being impertinent in offering you a respectful word of congratulation-Canada now is beginning to make her name in the arts, in music and the drama and in literature. Before the war she had done good work. As a result of the war she has written some poems which will run around the world, and I watch that development with the most profound sympathy, with the keenest appreciation and with the greatest hope for the future. I was just looking at the clock. I see I have been some little time. (Cries of " No, no! Go ahead!"). Now, why I chose today to speak to you about education was partly, as I said, because I wanted you to know what we are doing. I wanted you to know that our people are at least keenly interested in that subject. I wanted to express to you what I thought education meant and could do, and I wanted to learn what you are doing here. If I may for a few minutes before I sit down, I would say a word or two on lines on which I have often spoken in England to great masses of our own people. The whole world today, with one or two exceptions, is singing loudly the praises of democracy. The whole world renders lip service to democracy. They have learned that cry from the English-speaking peoples. Our great task in the future is to show the world what democracy can mean. There have been democracies in the past; there are democracies today, but I like to think that no democracy today is even a shadow of the democracies that our children's children may see in years to come. Freedom, which you guard so well in Canada, freedom can only be maintained, as has often been said, by a constant vigilance. A democracy can only be maintained when every man, woman and child in that democracy means to do everything in their power to make that community better, stronger, freer. The reason so many democracies in the past have fallen is because democracy is always in the old world on a knife edge, or, as I have often expressed it, it is a certain point in the circumference of a wheel, and how often has mankind travelled on the circumference of that wheel working their way with infinite labor to a point they call democracy, but when they are there,-go but a little further, democracy becomes license, license becomes anarchy, anarchy becomes tyranny; and man has to fight his way out of tyranny once again. We are convinced that we are on that part of the wheel, secure for the moment from either license on the one hand or tyranny on the other. It is our task to keep it there. We cannot keep it there without an educated people, educated not only in letters but educated in those deep, profound and moral truths on which our forefathers first of all built up the British Isles and went out to build up the Empire. You in Toronto, as much as in any place in the Empire, are the children of these men. From your position your influence on this great continent must be great, and must increase. Resolve, every one of you that you will all give your best thought, your best work, not only to the furthering of the interests of each individual among you, which, of course, is necessary, but to that greater community of which each of us is but a unit. Work for yourself, work for Canada, work for the whole Empire, and determine that so long as we speak the same tongue, obey the same God, obey the same laws, wherever we be situate, we remain to the end of time one people as the only hope of this world.

Amidst a storm of enthusiasm, MR. C. A. C. JENNINGS, Vice-President of the Empire Club, moved a vote of thanks to the Prime Minister. He said: " Mr. Chairman and gentlemen, for the reason that the President of the Empire Club himself is not with us today the moving of this vote has been assigned to me. Any words I have to say to you will not do justice to the address we have just heard-an address from one of the foremost Englishmen of the time interpreting to us the views and policy of his own country mainly on the subject of education. I hope that he goes back home to interpret there, the ideas of this Province, at all events, on the subject of education, he will be able to gratify them by showing what correspondence there is between their ideas and our own, and that is not an accidental correspondence. It is a consequence of our belief in the models of the motherland, consequence of our partiality towards these models and ideas. It would be hard to imagine any man at any time more competent to do this work of interpreting the Mother Country to the Dominion and the Dominion back to the Mother Country than the very eminent man who is at the head of the British Government.

After paying further graceful tribute to Mr. Baldwin, MR. JENNINGS said, " I wish to say in the name of the joint clubs that they are very proud to have had him as their guest today; that they shall treasure up the wise words-the statesmanly and kinsmanly message he has left with us; that they will pass it on in the records of the proceedings. They are deeply thankful to him and wish him and Mrs. Baldwin happy days throughout their visit to Canada-(Applause)-a pleasant voyage home and hope they will find occasion to come often and renew the warm friendships they have made since they came here.