AGRICULTURE IN SCHOOLS.
The teaching of agriculture in schools provided an interesting topic for debate at the Technical Education Association's conference in Wellington yesterday. But while some of the speeches were valuable con-fributions to the discussion, it seems to us that one or two of the suggestions put forward were misleading and based upon a mistaken conception of educational work. The purpose of schools in general is primarily to train the mind in the knowledge of first principles, and even in the case of technical schools the application of these principles on the practical side is possible only to a limited extent. The attempt to make instruction in agriculture either the foundation or the goal of training in our schools is therefore inconsistent with the principles of true education. But a far more serious error in regard to the nature and purpose of higher education is revealed in the proposal of Mr. G. J. Park, thatjn the postprimary school examinations of the Education Department and the University "agricultural and dairy science" be accepted as alternatives to the classics and modern languages, "with equal importance in marks value. ,. The obvious answer to this is that the object of agricultural training is technical and practical, and the purpose of academic training is cultural. The study of Latin an,d Greek, French and German, has a high cultural value, but the study of agriculture has none. Therefore it would be a grave mistake in educational policy to confuse the two forms of training or to allow "agricultural and dairy science" to supersede or even to encroach upon cultural subjects in the sphere of post-primary and academic training. ■ „ ~.
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Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 215, 11 September 1930, Page 6
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273AGRICULTURE IN SCHOOLS. Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 215, 11 September 1930, Page 6
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