The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1935. The Education System

Press, Volume LXXI, Issue 21578, 14 September 1935, Page 16

The Press SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14, 1935. The Education System

The word " decentralisation " is becoming very much overworked, particularly in its application to the administration of education. There is a very general feeling in New Zealand that the education system suffers from an undue concentration of control; but an examination of reports and pronouncements on the subject leads to the conclusion that most of the advocates of decentralisation have different objectives in mind. The Canterbury Standing Committee on Education, for instance, has argued powerfully for a relaxation of departmental control sufficient to permit the growth of an effective local initiative. Organisations of teachers 'usually mean by decentralisation the concession of greater freedom to schools and the development of curricula adapted to the needs of their districts. Mr Clyde Carr, in a speech in the House of Representatives reported in "The Press" yesterday, gave yet another meaning to the word. He complained that it was an undue centralisation of authority to permit the Canterbury Education Board to exercise jurisdiction over the whole of Canterbury and Westland and claimed that the Recess Committee on Education had recommended the creation of smaller administrative areas. It is most desirable, if the movement for the reform of the education system is to make any headway against the obstructive policy of the central department, that these varying interpretations of the word decentralisation should be clarified and reconciled. In a rational system of education there should be three stages of control—the central department, the regional authorities, and the school committees. The function of the department should be to organise and train the teaching profession, to maintain an inspectorate, to define school curricula in general outline, and to impose a certain minimum standard of efficiency on the regional authorities. The function of the regional authorities should be to control all schools, both primary and secondary, in their areas, to appoint teachers, and to adapt the curriculum to regional differences in the national character. The function of the school committees should be to enlist the active co-operation of parents in school management, to bring the school into close touch with the local community it serves, and perhaps to advise the regional authority in the making of appointments. The New Zealand system falls short of this ideal in several important respects. In the first place, the department has never been sympathetic to regional control and by the use of its power to issue regulations has whittled away the authority of local education boards until they are now little more than its local representatives. In the second place, the department and the education boards allow far too little freedom to teachers and school committees, with the result that the whole education system has acquired a deadening uniformity. In the third place, education in New Zealand has not yet been integrated on a local basis. The education boards control all primary schools within their districts, while each technical school and high school has its own board dealing directly with the department. The consequence is that the break between primary and secondary education is undesirably magnified and that the work of high schools and technical schools overlaps. It is possible to say, then, that the control of education in New Zealand is both under-centralised and over-centralised. Schools should be given greater freedom in their relations with the education boards and the department, and education boards should be given greater freedom in their relations with the department. On the other hand, secondary schools should be deprived of their independent control and, by subjection to regional authorities, brought into a proper relationship with the education system as a whole.