Liberal Education For Teachers Urged

Press, Volume C, Issue 29701, 20 December 1961, Page 2

Liberal Education For Teachers Urged

The British Ministry of Education had taken a courageous step in extending the period of teacher training from two years to three years at the peak of a teacher shortage, said Miss Monica Withers, a retired English inspector of schools, in Christchurch yesterday. “We believe firmly that teachers can only teach what they know and they need to have a broad and liberal education themselves,” she said.

Before even entering their teacher training, students must already have reached a high standard of education up to 18 years, she said. “To help meet the extreme shortage of teachers we hope to be able to provide refresher courses for married women who qualified as teachers and retired from the profession to bring up families." she said. “Many married women are coming back into teaching and we feel they will be more useful after a refresher course. Some who are shy about returning after a long break would also be more willing to come back if they were given a refresher course." After more than 20 years as an inspector in primary schools, some secondary schools and teacher training colleges, and earlier as a teacher. Miss Withers can look back on tremendous developments in British education. New Opportunities Since the Education Act of 1944 educational opportunities tor children in Britain had been quite remarkable, she said. Teachers were seizing these opportunities. “We are trying, in our teaching methods, to make use of our greater knowledge of how children learn,” she said. “There are always sceptics who say that if you make learning too easy for

children you are not preparing them for life. But it does not mean you are just smoothing the path. If you work with the grain in any material you tend to get better results. “Children put better effort into what they can see more purpose in, and derive more pleasure from it.” The idea was to prepare children for life and teach them to work hard; to be

ready to tackle things they do not always like doing. It was significant that children put out extra effort and were prepared to tackle pleasant and less pleasant jobs in the schools which really considered the needs of children and tried to fulfil the idea of the act suggested in the phrase: “education according to age, aptitude and ability,” said Miss Withers.

Children, with their abundant vitality, put special effort into their school work when it was geared to their needs and interests—so much so that teachers sometimes found it difficult to keep up with them, she said. “A New Zealand exchange teacher may not happen to get into one of these livelier schools and might get a wrong impression of British education,” she said. “This trend of gearing schools to a child’s needs and interests is general, although not yet universal in Britain.” Miss Withers feels that the most important single factor in education is language development in young children. “Unless you can speak, read and write you cannot really take your place in modern society,” she said. “Years ago I became interested in how children could express their own interests, ideas and feelings, with the influence of good literature on their development. Children were given the opportunity to talk about personal interests at first-hand experience and not just topics suggested by the textbooks.” Collection Miss VZithers began collecting written work of children between the ages of six and seven during the war. In their writing they gave fresh, personal accounts of their day-to-day living. But the writing from older age groups became more pedestrian, she said. “Now, in schools where the children have lively firsthand experiences, where firstrate literature is read to them and where they have wellchosen school library books available to them their written English has improved unbelievably in the last 15 years,” she said. English children were also being encouraged to be more articulate, because schools were making children more at ease by adapting to their needs. In this climate children talked more readily. “There are always notable exceptions in schools where a teacher does not encourage children to talk,” she said. A development in English school libraries now meant less reliance on textbooks and better access to good books of reference and information, as well as story books, she said. After her retirement, Miss Withers went to California to take part in a vacation course for teachers and is now on a holiday visit to New Zealand.