Teachers Blamed For Backward Adolescents

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32386, 27 August 1970, Page 16

Teachers Blamed For Backward Adolescents

Thousands of boys and girls left secondary schools every year without ever learning what they were capable of, and a large part of the blame for this could be laid on poorly-qualified teachers in both primary and secondary schools, Mr W. J. Scott, a former principal of the Wellington Teachers’ College, said in Christchurch last evening.

This was the most serious weakness in the educational system, Mr Scott said in an address on “The Strengths and Weaknesses of New Zealand Education,” at a public meeting arranged by the Canterbury Workers’ Educational Association. “The price we pay for incompetent, inadequately qualified or motivated teachers is high,” he went on. “They certainly help to swell the numbers of that large group of the fearful, the bored, and the rebellious who move reluctantly and unsuccessfullythrough the school

system until they go out, unqualified and emotionally spoiled, to do less work for their community, and live in it less successfully, than they should. * “A large number of these school-leavers cannot read with any ease or efficiency, and many who can have lost any desire to,” said Mr Scott. “It is my impression that there are a good many teachers who only imperfectly understand some of the newer material and methods of handling it, and cannot therefore teach it properly to children. “Some of this has been due to insufficient preparation, through necessarily brief inservice courses, and we can expect it to be reduced by the training now provided in the revised and longer courses in the teachers’ colleges. But some of it is also due to the fact that the new

syllabuses make demands which some teachers have not enough education, ability and energy to meet “The service has many dedicated teachers of great ability and perception; many more who are conscientious and thorough with enough ability and perception to do their work well; many of lesser ability and conscientiousness who get by; and some—a not large, but still not inconsiderable number—who lack the ability or the will, or both, to achieve much success in anything. "Raising the status of the teaching service by raising the salaries of teachers and at the same time improving the conditions for both them and their children will do something to weed out the least successful among them —the misfits, the sad, sour ones,” said Mr Scott.