A Rural Community Hall

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22120, 16 June 1937, Page 8

A Rural Community Hall

Readers will find in another column this.morning an account of a very interesting project in Rangiora—a community hall, the function of which, broadly, will be to connect more intimately, and at more points, the life and work of the Rangiora High School and the life and work of the community. The development of such a project is a natural and necessary outcome of the plan upon which the school has been organised now for many years. Governors and principal have started from the fact that, though Rangiora is a thriving and considerable town, it is the centre of a rural community and the heart of a rural life; and their aim has been to evolve an educational process in sympathy with the environment of the school, responding to its practical needs, serving" its cultural needs, using the life of the community as a source of materials, a guide to the problems which education seeks to define and solve, and working upon the life of the community as an enriching, a liberalising agent. The restrictions of so-called "academic" education have been loosed; the realistic aim has been to make education both practical and cultural, in a setose that unifies the one with the other. For it' is, of course, an insidious error which divides true culture, by no means the same thing as aestheticism, from the manysided business of life. All education is sociologically directed; but the principle followed in Rangiora specially deserves to be called sociological. It is so steadily and specifically authorised by the social needs and aimed at the social good of a particular community. It is also true that all education reaches only an artificialterminus, when the child leaves school; but it is in' a special sense true that Rangiora's process terminates artificially when the child leaves school. It implies and calls for continuity, for the completest possible co-operation between school and community, scholar and citizen. The constructive effort in the school and outside the -school should not be separated but correlated; and the true centre for their correlation is still, as in Denmark, for example, the school As Professor Lancelot Hogben said recently: "Education for "citizenship demands a knowledge of how "science is misused, how we fail to make the " fullest use of science for our social well-being, " and, in short, a vision of what human life "could be if we planned all our resources in- " telligently." Such education demands more than the turning out of adolescents at 16 or 17 as supposedly finished products. What more it demands Rangiora may shortly begin to show and begin to supplv.