Leaving School! For What?

Press, Volume LXXVI, Issue 22936, 5 February 1940, Page 6

Leaving School! For What?

The principal of the Christchurch Technical college, last week, directed the attention of his Board of Governors to the fact that many pupils leave in their first year, and that these and Others leave to gO to positions other than those for which their training has been designed. These facts are not hew, of Course. If has long Been a Weakness Of the post-primary system that large numbers of pupils remain at technical or high schools for too short a time. The - average period is • less than two years. During the years of depression, a tendency towards a longer average developed, for obvious reasons; but it has been reversed again

for reasons just as obvious. Opportunities to find employment have been plentiful; and the Government’s legislation has had the unintended and undesirable effect of encouraging employers to prefer the younger to the Older applicant. As Dr. Hansen said, the causes that carry children away from school too early are Various. The parent, the child, the state ©f the law, and economic conditions are all to blame. Teachers and school administrators 'are not Wholly guiltless, either. The spread of responsibility is enough to show that, if the obviously necessary reform is the raising Of the school age, to which the Government i§ Committed, it is not a complete reform. It is only the mechanism for the social and eduCktional reforms which go deeper. Parents must be Convinced that it is a short-sighted blunder to hurry children from school, untrained, into jobs without a future. Children are realists, after their fashion, and the educational process that does hot realistically satisfy them and therefore hold them must be searched for the reason. Employers and the State, With the school authorities, should reach a better reconciliation of industrial and social demands. New Zealand’s obstinate error, in pursuing educational reform, Is tft mistake mechanisms for real causes and to expect real results from them, Raising the school age would produce some advantages at once, no doubt, though not unmixed advantages; but It will not produce all that are expected of it and all that it should, until parent, child, teacher, employer, and politician are much more clearly agreed about them. ......