“Enormous Intensity” In Demand For Education

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29057, 20 November 1959, Page 14

“Enormous Intensity” In Demand For Education

The kitten that was education contained within school walls was now a tiger of enormous world significance, and he was frightened of it, the Director of Education (Mr C. E. Beeby) said in Christchurch yesterday. The intense passion for education in hitherto underdeveloped countries would result in tremendous social, political and economic repercussions, he said. He predicted that the future would see competition among nations for the services of educators.

Mr Beeby also warned that developed countries would have to provide a great amount of help to countries in which there was a surge of agitation for wider education, if they were to avoid becoming embroiled in “great social and political forces.” “For instance, the price paid for copra at present just will not provide schooling people in, say Africa, are going to need. Neither have they teachers,” he said. Mr Beeby was speaking at a special assembly of the Christchurch Teachers’ College where staff and students had gathered to congratulate him on his appointment as Ambassador to France. Mr Beeby is a former student of the college (as is his wife) and his farewell visit was a special one. He traced the evolution of New Zealand’s system of education from the “major problem” of adapting a system providing elementary instruction to many people and a full instruction for some, to as much education as possible for everybody. That had now ceased to be a national problem. In the last year or two he had realised it was being multiplied by thousands and

millions in other parts of the world. “For the first time in many parts of the world there has grown up a passion for education,” he said. The economic factor was an obvious reason and another reason was that peoples’ struggle for self-government depended on their own education and they realised it

“But the important thing is that throughout great areas of the world parents for the very first time have begun to realise their children could lead a better life than they themselves have led—not spiritually, unfortunately, but phvsically,” he said. These people were demanding education, not necessarily to the standard where they could read Shakespearean sonnets in the original, but enough to get a Government job, perhaps, and leave the tiny piece of land on which their forefathers had existed.

“There is enormous intensity in this demand for education. I have never been frightened of education before, but I am frightened of it now,” he said. Mr Beeby told the students that this would be the major problem, in his opinion, that they would have to face in their careers.