This letter to the editor appeared in the Sylvan Lake (Alberta, Canada) News on November 23, 1961:
At the regular montly meeting of the Women's Institute, W.W. Blick, principal of the Sylvan Lake School, was the guest speaker.
He stated that education to many of us meant the sum total of all that could be remembered of what was in the text books and the teachers' lectures.
Children are still graded on examinations and parents are concerned mainly on that grading. In this respect, education is failing because it does not teach people how to think.
In this, Mr. Blick stated, we are ahead of the Russians. They are not teaching their people how to think because a thinking socieity would not tolerate a totalitarian society. We know and feel that the future of our world is as H.G. Wells put it, " A race between education and catastrophe."
It is going to take a thinking people in some of the problems that face the world - unemployment, world trade, population pressures. If these problems are to be solved, the young and old must be taught to think.
What is old is new again.
ReplyDeleteTrue - and at the same time proves my point: we must keep stating the obvious in the hope that someone, somewhere, will listen. Sometimes I feel like we are the sentinels to the future and if we fail to stop the idiocracy, then we fail our children, and grandchildren, and ...
ReplyDeleteits not a issued for that of my point!
ReplyDelete