Change In Attitude To Children Urged

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31922, 25 February 1969, Page 2

Change In Attitude To Children Urged

Adults tended to have too much of a “big me and little you” attitude towards young children, an American professor in education said in Christchurch yesterday.

“I feel we need to watch children more carefully and listen to them more sensitively so we can help them in the way they want to be helped.” said Professor Nonna Law, of the Wayne State University in Detroit “Sometimes I think we plan without really starting where the children are—going with the grain, as it were. Children want to learn and we need to get our cues from them on how to go about teaching them.” Professor Law, who has been teaching for 30 years and who worked for five years as a psychologist in a child guidance centre at Winnipeg, in Canada, is vitally interested in early childhood education.

“I am quite convinced that if we give children a good

start and help the parents of young children, we would not have nearly so many families in trouble when the children are older.” she said. Play Centres

In New Zealand, Professor Law is visiting pre-school education centres and teachers’ colleges. She is particularly interested in the play centres in New Zealand. “They are very much like the parent co-operative nurseries in the United States, with programmes in which parents participate, administer and make equipment” Besides teaching graduates and under-graduates who will be engaged in early childhood education, Professor Law is the director of the university's laboratory nursery school. A demonstration school, it is used for training and research and is attended by 50 children aged from 2) years to five.

“These are the most important learning years and an interesting feature of our laboratory school is that the children come from different

social, ethnic, racial, and economic backgrounds. They are as broad a representation as we could get of metropolitan Detroit,” she said. “This gives students the opportunity to look at children as people, rather than as stereotypes in any one background." Not For All Nursery school was not for all children, she said. Many three-year-olds were not ready to leave their mothers. At the university, mothers were encouraged to stay with their children at the school but they did not play an administrative role, as in New Zealand play centres.

With Professor Law is Miss Beth Schultz, professor of biology and science at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo. Professor Schultz has been impressed by the Government’s reforesting scheme in New Zealand. "I am terribly concerned about conservation and am interested in how the earth is put together in New Zealand and how the people use it,” she said.