STOCK TAKING.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 288, 5 December 1935, Page 11

STOCK TAKING.

EDUCATION SYSTEM.

RESEARCH COUNCIL'S WORK. "QUICK RESULTS" NOT EXPECTED. The New Zealand Council for Educational Research has been established for eleven months. In research, eleven months is insufficient time for the fulfilment of any hopes worth holding, although long enough for the blasting of the highest. That such blasting has not occurred is, in itself, hopeful. Eleven months ago our problem was the finding of problems; eleven months hence we may have a few solutions; at present we are engaged almost solely in groping for methods (writes Dr. C. E. Beeby, the council's executive officer, in the December number of "National Education") This is a delicate but sometimes depressing business, for educational facts are elusive things. Occasionally one can catch them in a net of figures and exhibit them proudly in a graph. Such is the case in our investigation on "Progress Through the Primary School," in much of the work being done on educational and vocational guidance, and in that portion of our school entrance age investigation concerned with the effects of late entrance upon scholastic achievement. I

In other researches, as, for example, those into "The Idea of a Colonial University" and "Centralisation in Educational Administration," the first approach at least must be historical. In still others, of which "Adult Education in New Zealand" is a type, the ordinary survey techniques must be used. The intricate problems connected with the social and moral effects of late school entrance may yield to nothing but a tedious and detailed method of casehistories clinically considered, thousrh j here, as elsewhere, the questionnaire, "if used with caution, may be of some I value. If all else fails, one can still fall back on comparative methods, the balancing of local practice with that overseas, a useful technique where, as in the investigation of apprenticeship, masses of conservative opinion have to be moved. To Discover Facts. It is, perhaps, still a little pretentious to talk of research techniques in the social sciences, where all methods are really of the catch-as-catch-can variety, and where research is, and must remain, itself only one of the methods of philosophy. The function of educational, research is to discover facts when the educational thinker finds his thinking blocked by his own ignorance. The investigator must take his facts as he finds them. If they can be expressed in figures, so much the better, but if he can get nothing more objective than the opinions of wise and experienced teachers, those are his facte, and he must use them as best he can, despite the jibes of the more respectable sciences. Behind him always stands the educational philosopher.

[ So, at present, the firm has little to report beyond a glut in the problems department, a constant fitting and cutting and patching of methods, and the hope of something to put in the shop window before the next annual balance. To pretend that we have as yet made any concrete contribution to New Zealand education would be humbug. It was not our intention to produce quick | results. At the most we have provided ! a growing point for that rational thought which has never been absent from education, but which has seldom been its driving force. Teachers' Co-operation. The most important discovery of the year was that the teaching profession is genuinely anxious to help. We have received every assistance from the Department, the boards, the New Zealand Educational Institute and gther official organisations, for which we are most grateful. They, however, had already pledged themselves to back us. We had no claim upon the time and patience of the hundreds of individual teachers who have placed their knowledge- and their J classes at our disposal, and, whilst it would be an impertinence to thank teachers for doing anything for education, the council's investigators may at least express personal gratitude for the fact that, though they must often have been a nuisance, they have never been made to feel it.