The Press Junior THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1938. Beginning a New School Year

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22317, 3 February 1938, Page 4 (Supplement)

The Press Junior THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 3, 1938. Beginning a New School Year

This week the primary schools of New Zealand opened again for the beginning of a new school year. Hundreds of small girls and boys have spent the first few days of their school lives and thousands more have returned to lessons and ♦scholastic efforts after six weeks of sunny holidays. The smallest ones have so far no knowledge of the reason for their attendance at school; but those girls and boys who are high up in the standards have already some idea of the work they wish to do in the world, and some of them know that their school lessons are intended to help them in that work either directly or indirectly. This is a very important thing, to know that all school work and all home work, and indeed all work done either as play in the form of hobbies or as duty, will help in some way in the everyday work of living as an adult in the world. So all pupils in all schools should make it their aim each day to get as much as possible out of all lessons and all instruction in either work or sport. But every girl and boy of 10 years of age or more should take notice of a more important thing still; this is that it is never too early to begin thinking about careers and special work. _ Too many girls and boys begin to choose careers for themselves after they have left school, and only when they have taken up the newspaper to look for likely advertisements or when they have called for the first time at the office of a vocational guidance officer. Now every teacher who takes his or her work seriously will be eager to help a pupil who is anxious to find a suitable kind of work for which to begin training. It is true that most children change their minds many times about the work they want to do. j V. bov might want to be a tram conductor and then a fireman and then an engine driver and many other things in turn before he is nine years of age; and he may very well finish his life as a sailor or a hairdresser or a professor of languages. But it docs not matter if he changes his mind a dozen times in as many years: it is a good thing for him to have an ? iTn And if he is lucky enough to want to be the same thing when he is 25 as lie did when he was 15, that is all to the good and it means that there is one more person in the world doing the work for which he is best fitted. We have all heard much tpllr about square pegs in round holes; every° ne knows how unsatisfactory are the people who are discontented with their jobs, who think they could do some other job so much better and who continually grumble but never settle down and find some engrossing interest in their daily work. lt should be the aim of all girls and boys at the beginning of the year to devote themselvas to a carefully chosen hobby