Unemployed Teachers

Press, Volume LXIX, Issue 20937, 18 August 1933, Page 8

Unemployed Teachers

The figures of unemployment among teachers, quoted in an Auckland message yesterday, are most distressing; and, if a memorandum laid before, the Wellington Education Board and reported in the same issue may be accepted, early next year the ppsition will be worse. Even the principal remedy adopted, though it. is cer.tain to be effective, cannot be regarded as anything but a wretched necessity; for the closing of all the training colleges except Auckland by next year means that working organisations are dissolved and specialists as profitably used as razors are to cut butter, that the profession will lose -at least some recruits too good to bo lost, and that they and others must make a second choice, which is generally a worse choice, of a career. Undoubtedly it is necessary to remember that j omelettes are not made without breaking eggs. It is possible, even, to take some comfort from the fact that the training system is in many ways unsatisfactory and to hope that the standstill of the. routine may make it easier to plan useful reforms and to introduce them when the colleges reopen. Their affiliations with the "University, for instance,, should certainly be made closer, and their standard of scholarship, by that and any other . means, considerably raised. But what at present will strike many very forcibly is that teachers are unemployed, some of them because the school age lias been raised, but hundreds of others because the Education Department gravely miscalculated the number that would be required by the schools. It is not the. department that is pacing the penalty of this error; it is the young men and women who may quite fairly be called its dupes. Nobody can think this just, or even tolerable. It is true <Siat the department has never eon-

tracted with training college entrants to find them positions, once they have been accepted; the contract has been onesided, the trainee being under bond to serve in State schools for so many years within a specified period. But reasonable as this may be so long as the department judges its needs accurately, so long as the waiting list is short and the waiting time brief, reasonableness disappears when the department accepts droves of training college entrants more than it can place, in the end, and waves them off with the careless air of Drake on the bowling green. Rationing schemes have been introduced, of course, but it is impossible to pretend that they can be-satisfactory, whether the teacher is considered or the child. And the child is entitled to even longer and deeper consideration than the teacher. Unless better measures are devised,, the situation will for a space not merely remain bad; it will grow worse. In the circumstances, it seems impossible to avoid the conclusion that the department j should arrange to open temporary assistantships, at low salary rates I from the present training college rates, perhaps, up a shallow scalewherever extra teachers can usefully be employed. They should be attached for duty, in the first place, to experienced and skilful teachers taking large classes. In such positions they could give the staff teacher valuable relief, extend the individual attention received by the pupils, and themselves benefit by further training and supervision. It would also be possible to initiate profitable experiments in co-opera-tive teaching. A remedy of a different kind, however, is being sought by the Wellington Education Board, which is moving the department to admit that it has. " com- " mitted a vital mistake "and to lower ithe school entrance age again. It it to be hoped that the. department will admit no such thing and take no such action. The higher entrance age has scarcely begun to come under test; but, though it has been violently attacked, there is ver y good reason to think its evils either imaginary or such as may be overcome and its advantages likely to emerge more and more clearly.