Education and crime

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33962, 1 October 1975, Page 16

Education and crime

Sir, — Throughout New Zealand there are parents and teachers who would dispute J. W. Taylor’s statement that “the vast majority do achieve” under the present system. In their fanatical pursuance of the idea of making school “pleasant and easy,” our educationists seem to have replaced order and discipline with chaos. Look and say has been described as “a difficult, complicated, timeconsuming, uninteresting, unserviceable exercise in visual recall.” No wonder children from widely differing backgrounds, lacking the challenge of learning to read by “old-fashioned methods,” switch off from earliest schooldays. If J. W Taylor would speak to remedial reading teachers who seek to rescue the illiterate, he would hear a sorry tale of frustrated, anti-social children and disillusioned parents. He might be ready to agree that in at least a proportion of cases, the reading problem is indeed the “cause” rather than the “sympton” of delinquency. — Yours, etc.,