The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News. Morning News, The Echo and Sun. TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1939. ENGLISH EDUCATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXX, Issue 19, 24 January 1939, Page 6

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

TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1939. ENGLISH EDUCATION.

For ths mum that larkt msrtttance, For ths terong that need* retittanoe, For the future in the distance, And the pood that tee can do.

Criticism of our New Zealand education system has been frequent and free in pofrt-war j-ears, and one of the usual allegations has been that the secondary .school.-.' curricula are " too academic. " The schools have replied that if by " academic " is meant the old classical traditionalism it has long since been jettisoned, and there has been worked out " a harmonious synthesis of the cultural and the practical." More will be heard this year of this controversy, for the Education Amendment Bill, to which the secondary schools object, is to come up for passage in the next session of Parliament. Meanwhile all interested in secondary education may well give attention to a remarkable report on the subject made by the consultative committee of the British Board of Education, and published at the end of last year. The committee's outstanding proposal* are for the creation of a new type of technical school and for the drastic remodelling of the traditional curricula of secondary schools, which, it savs, " have ceased to correspond with the actual structure of modern society and with the economic facts of the situation."

In England,- the committee finds, the secondary schools secure the majority of the more gifted primary pupils by means of a selective examination at the age of 11, while the technical schools do not admit pupils, until* the age of 13. "This state of affairs has had a serious social consequence. The natural ambition of the clever child has been turned towards the grammar schools and the professional occupations rather than towards technical high schools and industry. This tends 'inevitably to create a disproportion in the distribution of brain power aa between the professional and industrial worlds. Furthermore, there is the regrettable and undesirable difference in socitl esteem." Hence the committee recommends that it is urgently necessary that "a new type of higher school, of technical character," should be established, to recruit pupils et the age of 11 and provide a five-year course. For two years the curriculum would be broadly the same as in the older type of secondary schools, but from age 13 onwards the pupil would have a liberal education, with science and its applications as the core and inspiration. These schools are to he of equal status with schools of the frammer school type. They would not give specialist training, but would inspire and prepare p«pil« for a practical as opposed to a clerkly life. As for the curriculum of the older fchools, the Committee says its framework was noapleted in the second half of tin nineteenth century, and is accordingly "more suited to n static then to tbe dynamic phaae ia which we live to-day." "On the one hand the pnptls assimilate too mucji and do too little; on the other hand, the schools ere inclined to eland too long upota the ancient ways and to be out of touch with the modern movement." All this has been said at various times, though with varying degrees of emphasis, concerning New Zealand secondary schools, and the suggestion that the present system tends to produce a surplus of black-coated workers and discontented " intellectuals * has- been heard in New Zealand as in England. For these reasons alone the long sefies of recommendations by this authoritative English committee deserves study in the Dominion, as much by those who oppose as by those who favour the unification of control proposed . in the Education Amendment BiU.