EDUCATION SYSTEM.

Auckland Star, Volume LX, Issue 138, 13 June 1929, Page 11

EDUCATION SYSTEM.

CRITICISM TOO DRASTIC?

DEFENCE BY DIRECTOR.

REVIEW OF RECENT PROGRESS

(By Telegraph.—Own Correspondent.)

WELLINGTON, Wednesday.

"It is all nonsense to say our education system is so bad that is should be completely recast," said the Director of Education, Mr. T. B. Strong, to-day, when welcoming members at the third meeting of the Council of Education. "However, that is what we are told by some intellectual 'highbrows' as well as by much less learned people. Our educa-tion-of the system is a sound, one, but it certainly can be improved, and is being improved."'

Since the last meeting, said Mr. Strong, advances had been made in the consolidation of small schools. The only things .that prevented faster progress in that direction were the necessity to avoid wasteful scrapping of good buildings, thejfheavy expense of erecting new consolidated schools, and the difficulty and cost of supplying suitable conveyances.

Reducing Size of Classes. The policy of the Department was to aim at a reduction in the size of classes, but until the country was able to afford sufficient money for the remodelling of schools, he did not hope for any rapid improvement.

"Undoubtedly the most effective way to reduce the size of classes," Mr. Strong said, "would be to provide ample accommodation by removing Standards V. and VI. to a central school, which might be either a separate:-junior high school (intermediate school) or an existing secondary or technical school. Such a reorganisation would have the further effect of absorbing unemployed teachers."

Unemployment among young trained teachers after they had completed their training had always been common. The check now placed on the number admitted to the training colleges was not imposed until. 102G, and its effect was not yet fully felt. According to the Department's figures there should be no unemployment after this year except at the beginning of each year.

Special Schools for Deaf. The work of establishing classes for mentally deficient but educable children had steadily progressed. There were now 20 classes in operation. The Department also intended to bring the special schools for the deaf and for recalcitrant and mentally deficient children directly under the control of the inspectors, and. hoped, with the help of the training colleges, to provide training for teachers who desired to become teachers of the deaf. A definite scheme of cooperation between the Education Department and the Mental Hospitals Department would soon be evolved.

Mr. Strong said .he was not at liberty to make the proposals public, but a more exact classification of mentally deficient children would soon be possible, and a definite attempt would be made to care for the children after they had finished their training in the special classes.

THE NEW PROPOSALS.

PROFESSOR ANDERSON

REPLIES

We have received the following from Professor W. Anderson, of Auckland University College:—

"It is small pleasure to me to stand in even the appearance of opposition to my honoured colleague, Professor Fitt, but, in view of his comments on my criticism of the scheme of unified control for schools, I think'it right that I should explain my position a little further. Briefly, our difference seems to be in this, that while Professor Fitt is thinking of what unified control might be, and idealises its possibilities, I am more concerned with what, in view of actual experience, we are likely to get. I can see no prospect whatever of the realisation of his vision of a local authority with fuller powers and responsibilities, along with special boards for the 'final administration' of eacli different type of school. Even if we got such a scheme on paper, what reason have we in past experience to trust the Department not to make of it simply a means to more intensive centralisation? Let us go back to Mr. Parkinson, who speaks from the centre of the politics of the whole movement. Mr. Parkinson contends in words for the restoration of local control, but trusts for that restoration to a Department whose record is notoriously one of sapping the powers of local bodies, reducing the secondary school authorities in particular to that state of impotence which Mr. Parkinson laments. Why should anyone hope that the local secondary boards should in future prove other than 'spineless and powerless' in face of possible aggression from the primary system ?

"Mr. Parkinson calls the New Zealand ■ educational system 'a thing of shreds and patches/ and Professor Pitt says it has grown piecemeal. This need be no ground for condemnation for the future; one has heard the same things said with pride of the British Constitution. Such a system is at least more likely to command local interest. What is necessary now is that the advocates of the present scheme should tell us plainly just what are the new developments which call for this plan of reorganisation. In default of anyone else, we must turn to Mr. Parkinson; from him we find that —over and above "the new gospel that 'the educative process is continuous' —they are the following: The need for the classification of pupils by 'discovered aptitudes,' the need for mobility in the teaching staffs, and the need for 'economy.' How long it is since they became pressing we are not told. But if these are deemed the critical factors in the present situation, then I submit that the resulting scheme can tend to nothing but bureaucracy. All of them imply a faith in the efficacy of methods whose operation requires a maximal attention to central 'surveying' and the massing of statistics, at the expense of the genuine work of instruction. May I add that the one thing I regret in Professor Fitt's article is his description of what I said about the different personalities of. the child in his different schools as mere 'oratory.' Here lurks the old materialistic suggestion that the animal continuity of the organism is the 'hard fact,' and the various grades of man's social being a mere surface appearance rather than a disclosure of new powers."