The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 1942. Training College Appeals

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23545, 24 January 1942, Page 6

The Press SATURDAY, JANUARY 24, 1942. Training College Appeals

The Manpower Committee in Christchurch, this week, heard appeals by the Canterbury Education Board for the release from the National Military Reserve of four specialist lecturers at the Christchurch Teachers’ Training College, and, after taking the evidence of the college principal, Mr J. G. Poison, reserved its decision. This was reported yesterday; all the appeals were dismissed. The effect is that when the college opens shortly, it will enter upon the year’s work under a double handicap. For three of the lecturers substitutes can be found, but “not without a loss of “ efficiency,” as Mr Poison moderately stated; for the fourth, by inference, no substitute can be found. At the same time the work of a weakened lecturing staff is made more difficult by the admission of many student teachers at a much younger age than usual. The committees decision was not taken on the spur of the moment, certainly. But since it was announced without any reference to considerations other than those which were opened at the hearing, it may be assumed that these were decisive; and it is not going too far to say, on that assumption, that the decision is disturbing. Mr Poison explained the grounds of the appeal with restraint but precisely. The lecturers at a training college are all specialists, not merely subject specialists but professional specialists. In a secondary school, for example, if the senior specialist in French is drawn into military service, one of his juniors, with comparable qualifications, may take up his work. Two things make such a transfer of responsibility more difficult in a training college, or impossible: the different organisation of the staff, and the fact that the lecturer is a specialist twice over, in his subject and in pedagogical science and technique. The work of a training college, moreover, is fundamental. The national system is supported and powerfully influenced by it. If the efficiency of a training college falls, the loss will reach a hundred schools, or two hundred, within a year; but it will not be picked up again within a year. “We muu not think only of “ the present, we must look to the “ future,” Mr Poison said. “If they “ [the teacher trainees] are half- “ trained, the children of thi£ country “ are going to suffer in the years to “come.” The question for the committee, he suggested, was whether the men appealed for could not be replaced “ more easily in the Army “ than at the college.” That was precisely true, and it was said of men who hold key positions in the education service and are privates, lancecorporal, and corporal in the reserve. Captain Bowron observed that such positions in the Army are ‘ neverthe “less very important”; Mr J. S. Barnett, the chairman, said that the importance of the college in the community was “ quite realised,” but the Army " needed the men.” It is difficult to feel convinced that the facts and the issues are well seized in these remarks. “ The Army needs the “men” does not settle any of the questions before the committee, which, so long as it sits to hear and decide them, is required to consider whether a man will best serve the country in the ranks or at his civil post. These appeals raised that question in a form of exceptional interest and importance. The committee appears to have realised imperfectly or not at all that, whatever further drafts military necessity may make on the teaching service as a whole, the efficiency of its training centres should be carefully protected. More than that. The heavier the drafts upon trained teachers, the more careful that protection should be. The service is being stripped; the more reason that it should not be starved.