The Press Saturday, September 6, 1930. The Education System.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20026, 6 September 1930, Page 14

The Press Saturday, September 6, 1930. The Education System.

The annual report presented to Parliament by the Minister for Education of course includes a large quantity of statistical and other cut-and-dried information, necessary and valuable. We are told, for instance, that the total expenditure for the year was £4,138,577, an increase of £175,598. If the cost of new buildings (£443,885 in 1929-30) is deducted, the cost per head of population stands at £2 10s 2d, while in 1929 it was £2 9s 3d; but these figures are not easy to correlate with those, in the Year-Book, which include cost of buildings and exclude expenditure from endowment revenue. The Year-Book shows that the cost of education per head was 13s 4d in 1899, 19s 7d in 1909, £1 14s Id in 1919, and £2 13s 3d in 1929. This ascending scale is worth considering. It suggests the question whether the country is deriving increased benefit from increased payments. Nobody would ask for, or could expect, proof that the education system is now producing results four times as good as in 1899, nearly three times as good as in 1909, and half as good again as ten years ago. Even if educational results lent themselves, as they do not, to arithmetical tests of that sort, it would still be necessary to remember that it cost a great deal to raise the salaries of teachers from a miserably low to a reasonably high level; but when every allowance is made that can be made, either for the difficulty of measuring and pricing educational results, or for undeniably just and useful increases in expenditure, the question is not dismissed. There is much more dissatisfaction with the working of the education system to-day than ten years ago. That does not mean that the system is working worse, or even that . it is, working very badly. But at least this is true, that in ten years the cost of education has gone up by more than 50 per cent., purchasing little but the discovery that education has lost its way. If there are respects in which the schools are doing better work than ten years ago—physical training and the arts may be suggested—they are not respects in which improvement has had to be bought at great cost; while in general standards of Avork, at any stage, there can be few who believe that the schools are excelling the earlier standard. Examiners' and other reports, among which special interest attaches to that on the last Junior National Scholarship examination, testing the cream of the sixth standard pupils, do not encourage the belief, and occasionally confirm the commoner suspicion that standards in some subjects have weakened. Yet to reach this curious position of doubt and suspense the taxpayer has spent, in this ten-year period, between thirty and forty million pounds, and the per daptit rate of expenditure has been forced up by half. This would be less disturbing than it is if the authorities were able to show clearly that they know what to do and how to do it. If money has not been thorouglily well spent in the past, it is a consolation to be sure that it is to be thoroughly well spent in the future. But the revision of the syllabus, the Minister's speeches, the Education Committee's Report, and the Minister's present report give hope an unsatisfying, mixed diet, of sound principles choked by elaborate rules, of vague notions, of administrative changes, the objects of which only ha!lf emerge from their statement, and of a wild scheme to pull the University to pieces and make two of it. The Minister in bis report refers to the revised primary syllabus as a sort of charter of freedom offered to the - teacher; and it is interesting to hear that the charter has been supplemented by an instruction to the inspectors to, allow teachers, if they arc competent, to accept and use this freedom. The Minister does not explain, however, why it is necessary to instruct inspectors that the syllabus means what it says and may be acted on, nor Avhy a syllabus which frees the teacher should be framed in terms more elaborately restrictive than ever. The departmental passion for laying down the . law to the last syllable and full stop, which reveals itself in the exhaustive detail of the syllabus, does not become less tyrannical because it declares for freedom and promises teachers that they need'not obey if they know how to, teach. Whether it is due to the same tendency to standardise everything or not, the Minister predicts that post-primary schools in New Zealand will "soon be of one main " type." - They will all provide " academic .courses for the few" and "broadly cultural courses with a "leaven of manual training for the "majority," while "one or more" of such • schools will be " set apart for "advanced technical instruction." This ,is a nejv and curious vision, alarming in its uninterpreted form, and the interpretation, when it comes, may increase rather than diminish its effect; for it is difficult to predict the final shape of any educational theory outlined by .the Minister. If he hps dropped agricultural bias, which is not mentioned in the report, he has taken up expanding intellects. He refers to "the normal racial increase in intel"lectual capacity," upon a belief in

which, far from sluggish, as the Minister appears to think it, almost any progressive scheme might be. founded.