Education.

Press, Volume LXVII, Issue 20412, 5 December 1931, Page 14

Education.

What will strike most readers of the special Educational Supplement issued with The Press to-day is the agreement of the contributors on the need for reform and, more than that, their broad agreement on its principle and direction and object. Miss Barr, the Headmistress of the Timaru Girls' High School, strikes the keynote to which the other writers have unconsciously responded when, having said that current criticism' has helped to awaken the secondary schools to a new study of their aims and problems, she chooses to describe their task as that of turning out "teachable pupils"— it does not matter whether we think of the next step as life and a living or the University—rather than " finished" products. 'For this reason Miss Barr seeks "greater elasticity" in the method and matter of instruction, while Mr Cockroft, the Headmaster of the Ashburtoq High School, is drawn to. a similar search by the special needs of a mixed school in a town at the heart of a country district. The contributor who signs himself " Sol" quotes from the most recent report of the Consultative Committee at Home, on primary schools, the deflation of the ideal curriculum, "less "in terms of knowledge to be taught,

" and more in terms of activities to be " fostered and interests to be " broadened." Speaking for the registered Secondary Schools, not << private " schools but a freer kind of " public " school, Mr A. K. Anderson, Headmaster of St. Andrew's College, argues strongly for their vital individuality, which warns us against the danger of a dead sameness in education patterned by a State Department, the danger, as the Headmaster of King's College has said, of a standardisation which fosters "con- " tentment with something less than "the possible best." The Headmaster of West Christchurch linds in the State pattern much that is " archaic," resisting development and preventing "full value being obtained from the "money spent," while , Professor Thompson, whose evidence 'before the Recess Committee of 1930-3.L "is reprinted, points out how the University is hampered and the secondary schools are "dying at the top" because of injudicious change and as injudicious refusal to change. Looking at the sequence of primary and secondary education, the Principal of Sacred H'eart College thinks that the time saved by reform in the primary is lost because the secondary schools have not altered their outlook and methods to take advantage of it. Yet she blames the primary schools also, in some respects, for an old-fashioned instructional attack that " absorbs too "much time and does not make for "success"; and this is supported by Miss Barr's complaint that too many entrants are " ill-equipped." The truth almost certainly is, as the Principal of Sacred Heart College declares, that improvement is " more a matter of "method than of money." And the key to improvement, most people will agree, as educationists agree, is in the teachers' greater freedom, not in their closer regulation and the stereotyping of the schools.