The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo. SATURDAY, JULY 26, 1930. AN EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 175, 26 July 1930, Page 8

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo.

SATURDAY, JULY 26, 1930. AN EDUCATIONAL REVOLUTION.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that we can do.

The Auckland Grammar School Board deserves credit for dealing so vigorously and frankly with the report recently issued by the Education Committee, and its official criticism of the report seems to us so effective and valuable propose to consider at some length the different phases of the probleih which it presents. As most critics have already remarked there are curious inconsistencies in the logic of the report. It proposes to unify the whole educational system and to centralise all controlling authority in Wellington. At the sortie time it professes a desire to increase local control and to extend the powers of local Boards; while it suggests that the appointment of the Boards' secretaries and of all teachers be transferred to the Education Department. How such a scheme can be compatible with a desire to strengthen local control and to promote efficiency it is difficult to conceive.

As to the reasons advanced in the report for the virtual abolition of Boards, the Grammar School Board's statement disposes of these effectually. The-report maintains that the primary school syllabus is dominated by the requirements of the proficiency certificate test, and that the secondary school syllabus is dominated by the matriculation test, and it argues that the primary and secondary school Boards should therefore be abolished. But this, of course, implies that the Boards have been responsible for the syllabus in each type of school. The truth is that the Education Department itself is solely responsible for the primary school syllabus, and very largely for the secondary school syllabus as well. Where, then, is the logic or the justice of the conclusion that the Boards are harmful to education, and therefore must be swept away?

Aifother absurd inconsistency in the report is revealed in its condemnation of the secondary schools' for alleged neglect of their younger pupils, by employing the best and most experienced masters to teach the highest forms. For the report elsewhere specially commends the primary schools on the ground that the highest standards are taught by "the best and most experienced teachers, all specially trained for the work." What is laudable and admirable in the primary school is therefore mistaken and harmful in the secondary school." But the compilers of the report were evidently anxious to produce the worst possible impression about our secondary schools, and therefore they have fallen back upon the threadbare and puerile charge that the secondary schools emphasise "social distinctions" which are undesirable, in a democratic, country. w ~ 'ii

The Grammar School Board has simply demolished this silly indictment in a paragraph which reminds us that nearly all our secondary school pupils have come from the primary schools, and that in the secondary schools the sons and daughters of rich and poor, wageearners and professional men, sit side by side and work under the same conditions in perfect d/mocratic equality. An even more effective castigation is administered to the report in regard to its, proposal to abolish scholarships and award bursaries in their place. The suggestion that these bursaries should be distributed not on the results of competitive examinations, but at the discretion of "superintendents," who can have no possible means of comparing the capacities or acquirements of all the candidates, strikes us as one of the most fatuous proposals ever made in this country by a responsible authority.

We have unfortunately no space to review the trenchant arguments by which the Grammar School Board shows that the abolition of scholarships would inflict grave injustice and hardship on deserving students, and that it would lower the level of University education. But by far the most important and objectionable features of' the report are its depreciation of the secondary schools, its persistent effort to belittle the value of examinations and of academic training, its proposal to "unify" the educational system, with the inevitable consequence of installing primary school ideals as the dominant factor, and its obvious determination to centralise all authority in the hands' of the omnipotent Department at Wellington. There are valuable recommendations in the report, but Parliament must pay : careful attention to such criticisms if and when the report comes before it.