Jobs Yet Unknown Will Be Common In 2000 A.D.

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31238, 9 December 1966, Page 2

Jobs Yet Unknown Will Be Common In 2000 A.D.

Of the occupations that will be common in the year 2000, it is estimated that 70 per cent are not yet known or recognised, said Mrs Doreen Grant in an address at the prize-giving ceremony at the Waitaki Girls’ High School yesterday.

Some of the girls at the ceremony were almost certain to visit and, perhaps, work at Antarctica. It was just possible that one of them Ltcy reach the moon, she said.

Never before had it been so necessary for girls to be educated for life and not just for filling in time until marriage. Never before had it been so necessary for girls to receive an education to develop them to their full potential. At any stage in their life—before marriage, after marriage or in middle life—their basic education should have fitted them to train or retrain for a business or professional career, or to learn new skills or techniques in a quickly developing technological age. “Education is valuable not only as a means of earning a living but also because it develops your capacity to think and reason,” she said. Training To Think “To me. the most important function of education is not the learning of facts and figures, important as those are, but the training of children to think for themselves. The future of the world depends on the thinking of its youth.” Those leaving school today would go into a world very different from the world of their parents’ youth. Hence it was difficult for parents to understand youth’s reaction to

this vastly complex and everchanging environment. Never before had there been such a need for clear thinking to establish values and standards that were acceptable to parents and teenagers alike. Both Intolerant Young adults could be just as intolerant and demanding as they accused older people of being. Parents and children working together should be able to find solutions acceptable to both generations, she said. “Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the greatest leaders the world has known, once said: ‘lt is a great honour to be a great person and each of us can be a great person, even though living in a small community and not particularly recognised by those about us. You are a great person provided you are a factor that keeps the community going.’ “It has never been easy to keep the community doing the right thing: today it is more difficult than ever,” Mrs Grant added. So many and so varied were the pressures directed at the young adult, that both she and her parents found difficulty in deciding what was the right thing. There was the pressure of high wages and leisure time; the pressure of high-powered advertising aimed at the welllined pockets of working youth, who were too inexperienced to be able to assess real value. There was also the pressure of the socially irre-

sponsible Joneses who drove tod fast, drank too much and too often, and were looking always for “kicks” which could lead to vandalism. If New Zealand was to play its part in the world of tomorrow, it was vital that girls as well as boys should take full advantage of every type of education from which they were capable of receiving benefit, she said. “But no matter what life holds in store for each one of you, whether you become an Indira Gandhi, an Eleanor Roosevelt or accept the responsibility of, perhaps, the most worth-while role of all—that of wife and mother—never forget that your greatest influence will spring from your feminine qualities. “These qualities, so needed in the world today, are compassion, tolerance and a concern for the life of the individual. “And never forget that it is the woman who sets the community standards,” said Mrs Grant.