" IN MELTING POT."

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 119, 22 May 1928, Page 11

" IN MELTING POT."

POSITION OF EDUCATION.

PROFESSOR FITT'S VIEWS.

LESS VOCATIONALISM NEEDED.

The first of a series of lectures arranged by the Auckland Educational Society was given at the University College last evening, the speaker being Professor A. B. Fitt

Mr. A. G. Lunn, who presided, said that a membership of a hundred had been obtained, but an increased number was hoped for. Arrangements had been made for five lectures. It was recognised that education was in the melting pot, and that New Zealand was spending four millions a year on something that was realised to be largely experimental.

At the outset of the lecture Professor Fitt mentioned that the ancient Greeks believed that education and politics were inseparable. Education 1 to-day was practically everybody's business, but very few people made it a serious business. The true ideal was to make it a study of every-day life. Every subject had two sets of values, the material and the spiritual, and if the work of the world was to be done more thoroughly, vocational training had also to be done more thoroughly.

Professor Fitt said that' vocational training did not tend to free the individual from his environment, but on the other hand the tendency was to enslave him. A liberal or cultural education enabled the individual to rise superior to the conditions of environment, and the great need of the moment was not more vocationalism in education, but less of it.

The lecturer said that every vocational body should take an active part in providing the means of training youth to carry on callings when education in the more general sense was completed, and if vocational training was taken up in that spirit a great advance would be made. It was a fallacy to regard education and schooling as synonymous terms. Every organisation in a community should regard itself as an educational factor. There were probably no men or women who gave more of their best than school teachers, but there was need of support from all the community. Every citizen should be his own censor, because of the influence that could be exerted.

Professor Fitt referred to the great interest that was being taken in education in other countries. He said that the United States in 1925 spent over 400 millions, which was over one-quarter of the public expenditure. The expected results were not realised, and the boys and girls did not appear to be as keen on schooling- as in New Zealand. Again, the American children lived in a different adult atmosphere compared with those of the Dominion.