FOR THE LATE 20th CENTURY

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30512, 6 August 1964, Page 7

FOR THE LATE 20th CENTURY

llrom an address by D. B. McSWEENEY, Lecturer tn Rural Education, Lincoln College] “New Zealand, with a population of three million in 1975, will be unable to afford the luxury of ignorance. Her greatest safeguards against unemployment or a declining standard of living will be a versatile, imaginative, well-educated and dynamic population.”

“By the end of this decade, 3.000,000 youngsters will be starting their quest for jobs each year, as against 2,000,000 now. This guarantees trouble in getting the unemployment rate down to 4 per cent, because the proportion of idleness among teenagers is always far higher than it is among their elders.”—The "New York Times,” 1961.

Warnings similar to this are being sounded to young people in many parts of the world. Whether the nation is the United States or Russia, Canada or Nigeria, the warnings are the same: automation, population growth, lack of education, or inflexibility are reducing the job opportunities for certain groups of young people.

A very forceful lesson about the dangers of a poor education can be learnt from Canada. In this country, which claims the second highest standard of living in the world, unemployment rates have been very high, averaging 10 to 11 per cent in the Atlantic provinces in 1961. To me the most important feature about this unemployment is the fact that over 70 per cent of Canada’s unemployed had only the equivalent of our primary school education. At the same time as these figures were taken out, Toronto had 20,000 jobs for skilled workers going unfilled. In that same city there were 23,000 unplaced job applicants whose qualifications were not high enough for the jobs offering.

Against this is the fact that for youth of the right calibre in an expanding, dynamic economy, the sky is the limit If these young people gather career information wisely, select their future job with prudence, and prepare for it with enthusiasm their future looks bright indeed. For Youth The Certainty Of Change It might be wise at this stage to bring this discussion as close to home as possible. Let’s say your boy is now aged 15 and in the fifth form. The year is 1964. In about 10 years he will be married and over the following 10 years he is likely to have about three or four children. In the first year or two the family benefit will just about keep these children.

But in 1989, when your son is in the prime of life and aged 40, he will be putting his children through high school and preparing them for an even more technological age than the one in which he is working. The point here is that education today will dictate in large measure the sort of life your family will live at the end of the century. Very few pupils of this school will live out their lives on the farms or in the related services of Banks Peninsula. Three-quarters of them will probably live and work in cities. And they will not simply work out their life in the one job for which they were trained in their youth.

Both President Kennedy and President Johnston have spoken about the effect technological advances have on the work men do. Most workers in industries and commerce of the next 30 years will probably have to learn about three new jobs as new machines, automation and new products make them redundant in their old job. It is only the versatile, welleducated and adaptable person who will survive such a social revolution.

And don’t think it is just the men who will need to develop and retain this mental and physical alertness. The pattern for girls of marriage after a few years of work, then domestic bliss, the dishes and radio serials until the grave is a thing of the past for most women. Your daughter will probably have her last baby at 26. Her children will be virtually independent of her when she is 40 and she will live on for about 30-40 years,

about five of them without her husband. Her education and her vocational training will likewise dictate the quality and the richness of her life. You can see from this the importance of education for life in the late twentieth century. It’s time now to look at the school—the main educational agency—to see how well it is equipped to satisfy the demands which will be made on them.