N.Z. EDUCATION CRITICISED

Press, Volume LXXXIX, Issue 27213, 3 December 1953, Page 8

N.Z. EDUCATION CRITICISED

“TOO MUCH A MATTER OF KNOWLEDGE”

ADDRESS BY MR H. W. BEAUMONT

New Zealand’s educational system, and that of many other countries of the world, had become too much a matter of knowledge and too little a matter of education, said Mr H. W. Beaumont, education officer of the Canterbury Museum, in an address to the Association of Friends of the Canterbury Museum. Knowledge had become a substitute for education, he said. Too much attention was given to a set of symbols in a book or on a blackboard or to the spoken word and too little opportunity was given for children to see for themselves the things about which they were taught. “It is small wonder that the one educational institution in Christchurch which gives experience of these things should attract a clientele of 60,000 children a year,” Mr Beaumont said. Good teachers supplemented the spoken or written word with pictures, but no two-dimensional picture anywhere in the world could teach as efficiently and as completely as the object itself. The idea of teaching in the museums began in the United States and quickly spread to Britain. “But you will find nowhere in the world a system such as we have in New Zealand—a system where we can bring the children into the museum, divide them into small groups, and give them a guided tour so that they can discuss what they see and draw their own conclusions,” he said. In the United States he had found only envy for this system. In the American Museum of Natural History, which he had visited, there was an educational staff of more than 70. About 30 of these were teachers. Groups of any number between 50 and 1000 visited the museum and were taken in classes of 50 on an hour’s tour of the collections. That was a walk of about two miles and a half and there were many more miles of walks in the corridors of that museum. Only one visit was given each child during the year. Teachers on this staff were required to know only three lessons. “Perhaps we are overloading our own staff when we ask that they know 20 lessons, but I have not yet seen any wilting under the strain. ’’ he said. In New Zealand classes were divided into small groups. Children could see the exhibits, and discuss among themselves what they saw. The teacher was only a guide, asking leading questions and supplying answers when required. “If you put 1000 children in the Civic Theatre I could lecture them, I could entertain them, I could indoctrinate them; but I would not presume to say I could educate them,’’ Mr Beaumont said. “But if I could get six of those children round the early printing press that came out on the Charlotte Jane and hover about as a guardian angel as they examined it and discovered how it worked, they would receive much more education in 20 minutes than they would at a lecture, no matter how good. “Our job at the museum is not to fix facts but to loosen hypotheses,’’ Mr Beaumont said. “The museum offers education that is not the slave of symbols. Through his senses the child can learn much more than he can from a spate of words. It is education that demands thought, reason, imagination, and emotion. It can arouse a child’s wonder and curiosity. History becomes something absolutely real.’’ The museum educational staff knew that children’s interest was aroused because often a child brought “Mum and Dad back on a Sunday to give them the lesson.”