Community Pressures On Pupils Seen

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30529, 26 August 1964, Page 22

Community Pressures On Pupils Seen

New Zealand was not breeding a race of paragons even though a New Zealander could be found in a key post in almost every university in the world, said the president of the New Zealand PostPrimary Teachers’ Association (Mr L. E. Adams) in his address to the annual conference of the association at Auckland yesterday.

“However, we may be building better than we know," he said. “There are community attitudes which can be resisted only so far. “Pupils today can be and generally are hard working and co-operative, but various social and commercial pressures pull them in the opposite direction from school conservatism and home restraints. They work on Friday nights and holidays and become adult before they leave school, years earlier than was once the case. “Patriotism has come to mean little, royalty appears to them an anachronism, the war is ancient history and the depression did not exist. Economy in the use of money or materials is pointless in an age of plenty; good jobs with go>d pay are a right no-one ean take away and the Government that pays for one’s training is morally obliged to justify Its expense by providing the right job in the right place.

“A mammoth lottery philosophy is good enough for the nation and a chance can be taken in moral matters with little reference to the Christian message. Youth grows up in this atmosphere, into a world of over-employment and affluence.

“The State schools play

their full part In counteracting such influences and it goes without saying that the higher the quality of recruitment the greater is the social as well as the academic return to the nation.

"Many teachers within the secularly of our schools are accepting the greater responsibility of Christian leadership and most schools set out to instil Christan attitudes in all aspects of social behaviour. Indeed, the secularity of our. State system is not a weakness but is at the very heart of its strength. “I am convinced that our State schools are a credit to the country both academically and In their general and moral training. I know that the great majority of the members of the teaching profession hopes that this highly satisfactory state of affairs will never be altered by the

gradual development of a dual system whereby Independent State-aided schools and State State-aided schools will come to cater for children of differing social strata. The balance between the two types of school, as it is now, allows for mutual respect and competition and is a further sign of the health of the system. "The community, the schools and the Education Department must combine to find some way of helping young adults through the difficult years of their later schooling. While it may not be practicable yet on any scale, I make the serious suggestion that school and work must overlap. It Is becoming increasingly difficult for parents and schools to maintain the old school disciplines and restrictions on the mature young adults of the sixth form,” said Mr Adams.