POST-PRIMARY TEACHERS

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27040, 15 May 1953, Page 5

POST-PRIMARY TEACHERS

REMITS PASSED AT CONFERENCE (Neto Zealand Press Association) Wellington; May 14. About 40 remits concerning school certificate and matriculation were dealt with by delegates to the annual conference of the Primary . Teachers’ Association held in Wellington this week. Most of these were taken this morning. They resolved to ask that agriculture, art, and a subject acceptable to the Otago School of Home Science be allowed as matriculation subjects. Delegates rejected proposals that for school certificate shorthand and typing should be separate subjects, and that a compulsory short arithmetic paper be set, because “teachers and schools are frequently criticised by employers and others on the subject of arithmetic.”

Two resolutions on school certificate English were also lost. They were: “That the Education Department be asked that in the school certificate English paper it be made compulsory for candidates to answer at least one question on literature”; and “That in the school certificate examination in English the optional questions on literature be designed to test response to literature rather than knowledge of the facts of literature." The conference wants the university’s academic board to define the periods of the two papers of the university entrance scholarship examination in history. It will ask also that there be close consultation between the university and teaching bodies when altering the prescription of examinations which concern schools. A motion that some concession be granted in school certificate English to immigrants to whom English is a foreign language did not have a seconder.