Slow Learners Of Arithmetic Secondary Schools’ Problem

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29205, 16 May 1960, Page 10

Slow Learners Of Arithmetic Secondary Schools’ Problem

(New Zealand Press Association)

WELLINGTON, May 15. The responsibility of telling parents that their children were not “up to scratch’’ fell almost entirely on the post-primary school, said the officer for school mathematics in the Department of Education (Mr E. H. L. Hawkhead) today. He was addressing the science congress, meeting in Wellington, on the teaching of school mathematics.

Mr Hawkhead said the postprimary school had a task which, until the last few years, had not been tackled on a large scale. It was how to present a secondary stage in education to a group whose grasp of the fundamentals of reading and arithmetic were insecure and. tn some cases, primitive

“During the period before social promotion, a parent whose child spent two years in a single class was being convinced early that the youngster was a slow learner. “Today, the whole burden of

convincing parents of the inadequacies of their children falls almost entirely on the postprimary school.”

The slow learner group, he said, might represent two classes in a third *onn intake of seven classes. From the point of view of mathematics, the educationist had to ask whether he should, at the post-primary level, continue to try to strengthen fundamentals in arithmetic at a point where it seemed that eight years of schooling had failed to do that

"Should we look the problem in the face, say written arithmetic is not for these children, and use concrete material to work with? “The problem is not just a. New Zealand one. It confronts the secondary schools in Britain, too,” he said.