Dec. 8.
Dr, Thring, one of the greatest headmasters who ever lived, once told a pupil that the end of all education was to learn not: to be a fool. Sir Henry Hadov Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield versity, in a recent speech-lay address has amplified this' die-tum by enumerating the marks of the fool. He says there are three of them, The first is that the fool makes the same mistake twice: the socqd, that he leats and wastes time; while the thir is that he thinks more of himself than he does of his job, and this, Sir Henry remarks, is the most poisonous of the three, It was said of the Bourbon dynasty. in France that its members learnt nothing and forgot. nothing, and it may be said with an equal amount of truth that both nations and individuals are far too prone to learn nothing from their mistakes and failures, History teems with instances of races, governments and person falling into exactly the same er= tors as they have done on former occasions, Their mistakes have taught them nothing. Faced with the same combination of circumstances, they will commit exactly the same mistakes again and again, To the wise man the making of an error is a valuable piece of education. carefully examines the whole situation, Jearns just where he has gone wrong and where he has been misled by appearances, and go determines that, when next he encounters a similar problem he will act in a different manner, The same line of rea soning applies to communities, though history teaches us that the community has been slower than the individual in utilizing its past errors as stepping stones to better things. This is pecially the case where countries are ruled by bureaucratic departments, a8 most communities in spite of their bo-posed to possess demo-governments. A govern: ment department never learns wisdom from its past errors for the simple reason that no depart ment regards itself as being anything but infallible, As for the loafer and time: waster, plenty of examples can be found. Loafing too frequent ly starts in school, where there ways a number of pupils to allow the teachers, at the cost of immense energy and labour, to drag them up.to that point at which they can just serape through the necessary exams, the teachers being weak or foolish enough to do the greater part of the work so that the students shall have as little of the drudgery as possible, uch youths, when they go out to the world, are surprised and annoyed that their path is not made equally easy and thus they (Continued on Page £89.) el
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.