EDUCATIONAL NEEDS.

Auckland Star, Volume L, Issue 189, 11 August 1919, Page 4

EDUCATIONAL NEEDS.

The Board of Education is to be congratulated on its enterprise in originating the conference between educational authorities and members of Parliament fixed for to-morrow, and we are glad thut the scope of the conference has been extended to all branches of education. The Dominion's educational needs are many, and some of them are most urgent and will entail heavy expenditure. Perhaps the chief weakness in educational policy has been lack of co-ordination. Primary education, secondary education, ■•technical schools, and the University have been treated too much as separate systems divided by water-tight compartments, rather than as inter-related parts of one great living organism. Tomorrow's conference is an attempt to view the problem as a whole; its tass. will be not only to see the needs of 'each branch of education, but to see them in relation to the complete structure, and to place them in order of importance. The most urgent improvements are demanded by the primary schools. We must do away with overcrowding, and provide better buildings in many cases, and we must rcduco the size of classes. These faults have 'become scandals, and it is Parliament's plain duty to insist on th_ required improvements. But members of Parliament who attend to-morrow's conference should take a broad view of the education problem. They will 'be doing only part of their duty if they go down to Wellington with the idea that the improvement of our primary system is all that matters. There are also problems connected with secondary, technical, and university education to consider. There is, for instance, the absolute necessity of obtaining an adequate grant at once for tho main buildings of the new University College, which among local needs is equalled only by those of our primary schools. We need not consider here all the questions that will come before to-morrow's conference. We have mentioned the building and staffing requirements of our primary system, and the completion of the University College because they are the most important, and it will be tho husitiess of tho conference to help members of Parliament to make up their minds as to the order in which requirements should be placod. ~* The education problem should ! b_ studied on Dominion

lines, but we do not incur the reproach of parochialism when we say that because of its very rapid development the Auckland province is peculiarly interested in whatever intention the Governmen„ has to increase the grant for education. Increase of population, the rate of which will not diminish, lias put a severe pressure on our schools in town and country, The problem ot the backblocks school, both in the adequacy of the accommodation and the quality of the teaching, is larger, and probably more acute, than anywhere else in New Zealand. Our University needs are certainly greater. Every city except Auckland, the largest, has its permanent and complete University building, and the plain truth is that if work is not started soon upon the main part of our University College, on the site chosen, before very long the institution will have to turn students away. These and inanj- other facts will be put before the conference to-morrow, and we hope there will be a large attendance of members of Parliament. It is notorious that education has not received from Parliament the attention that it deserves. Auckland members who wish to remedy this—and we must assume they all do— tvill have an opportunity to-morrow of obtaining information and hearing opinions which will help them to puj, the needs of the Dominion in general, and Auckland in particular, intelligently and forcibly before Government and Parliament. I