Letter Bag
The Parents’ Review, 1927, pp. 695-696
August 20th, 1927.
Dear Editor,
Having only just seen the August number of the Parents’ Review, I am moved to protest against any form of words which implies that Miss Mason is out of date already.
She is usually spoken of as a pioneer in education, a pioneer being one who goes ahead, plans for the future, and prepares a way for others to follow. If we accept that view of her work, we must trust her foresight and resolve to adapt our doings, our schools, the circumstances of our times, to the teaching of her philosophy, in much the same way as we strive to amend our lives in obedience to the teaching of our religion. When we have received principles, religious or educational or artistic, to guide our lives, loyalty requires us not to change them but to live up to them. It is our lives which have to be adapted to suit the principles, not vice versa.
Miss Mason’s principles are as yet understood by comparatively few persons and have been tested by not more than two generations during her lifetime. Their worth is known in the persons of children who have been brought up “on P.N.E.U. lines.” When these children become parents there will be some chance of Miss Mason’s philosophy becoming the unconscious philosophy of all earnest parents. It is a philosophy for a lifetime but especially for the years of childhood during which an interruption is a loss of time and of power. The children in Form I. to-day were babies when Miss Mason went from us and they still have all their school days before them. They want continuity. The children who had begun P.U. School work in 1923 have not yet finished their education. Miss Mason knew what they needed and has left us the wealth of her thoughts upon their education in her written books. Our motto must be apply, not adapt. Marvels have been wrought for the children by teachers who have had only the printed word to guide them. Then what might not be done by us who have had the privilege of knowing Miss Mason as her friends, if we would have courage to bring modern life to the bar of her philosophy in order to judge it by her wisdom, instead of judging her by its changing fashions?
Yours truly,
Agnes C. Drury.
Dear Editor,
When we were at the House of Education, we were told how wonderfully modern discoveries have borne out Miss Mason’s philosophy. In this connection the following words may be interesting. They are taken from a chapter on “Psychology and the Life of the Spirit” in The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day, by Evelyn Underhill.
“Thus the primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It stands, or should stand, at the door; selecting from among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and bad, which life pours in on us, those which serve the best interests of the self.”
The passage struck me at once, because of its close resemblance to what Miss Mason has taught us of “the way of the will,” in Ourselves, and elsewhere.
Yours sincerely,
E. Manders.
Editor’s Note: The formatting of the above article was optimized for online viewing. To access a version which is formatted more similarly to the original, and which includes the original page numbers, please click here.