DEVELOPING TALENT

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 51, 23 November 1929, Page 12

DEVELOPING TALENT

MORE SCHOLARSHIPS NEEDED MAKING USE OF THE BEST "More scholarships are needed every year, especially to encourage research for our.- primary industries in order to meet more severe world competition,” said Professor Macmillan Brown, Chancellor, in his address to the University Council of New Zealand yesterday. The Chancellor said he would like to congratulate the university on the generous and enlightened policy of the new Government and its Minister of Education. Those who in the new Senate would have to take up the burden of university work counted it the greatest of good fortune that the subsidy that had been granted by statute since the beginning of that institution had been again restored; they would not need to abolish scholarships or economise over encouragements to learning. If there was one thing more than another in the system of. education that was stimulative of talent it was the granting of undergraduate and postgraduate scholarships.

Up to Capacity. “Of course, it is an essentiol of a civilised community that every man and woman should be educated up to their capacity,” said the Chancellor. “But no nation or race advances unless there is a method of drawing out its specal talents and stimulating them to the utmost. Scholarships to bring the capable young men and women from the primary system to the secondary and again to the university are essential, though the system can be overdone. Teachers in the secondary schools and in the university colleges have their task obstructed by the excess of average and under-average intellects that crowd their classes; this (feature of our system prevents education advancing as it ought to do. I have heard teachers again and again complain that they cannot do full justice to the talent they feel it their duty to the country to develop, because they have so many mere pass students to train, a proportion of whom never attain success and can never attain it. The most grievous complaint is that the secondary schools have so many who remain under their tuition too short a period to have much good from it.”

Field for Ta! o t:'. “Almost as grievous is it that in the university colleges the professors who are eager not only to do research themselves but to stimulate talents for research in the best students, have their hands too full of students who are just up to the level of a pass degree to fulfil their ambition. And this wastage will go on as long as there is so little selection by the entrance examination and" too few scholarships, especially post-graduate, to tempt the talented to seek the best sphere for their talents. Of course in all scholarship systems there is a certain amount of waste, but the higher we go the less there is. as the research student has found his true career; it is in the postgraduate system that the wastage reaches its minimum. It would pay the country to take a proportion of what is spent on sending the youth of average or below average ability to secondary schoors or in bringing them to the pass stage in university colleges, and spend it on the development of talent, especially talent for research. It is true a percentage of those who gain post-graduate ’ scholarships and go abroad do not return, because of the wider field for talent in the more developed countries and the scarcity of well-paid posts in New Zealand; but the percentage is not very large, and those that remain abroad are often so brilliant that they spread the name of the Dominion throughout the world and form the most striking of the advertisements that, we are told, she needs. “If there is' ’one thing more than another that a country, especially a young country like New Zealand, needs, it is a system that would draw the most talented from all ranks and by scholarships stimulate their development so that its future may be in the hands of those who are best able to see beyond the present to make the most of its possibilities.

Days of Tliv’f';" “It was i> wise policy on the part of the Senate in its early days to save what they could from the fees and the subsidy and lay it up for a time when scholarships would be more and more needed. Now it takes not only that little store but the subsidy and all we can afford from the fees to keep the system working. Yet we need every year more scholarships, especially to encourage research for our primary industries now that more severe competition in the markets of the world lowers the price of our eommoditie.s. Some of our citizens have generously come to our help. But this spirit of generosity based upon a realisation of the fact that the surest method of meeting the menace to our industries in research, will spread, let us hope, not only amongst our wealthy citizens, but amongst our politicians: for the problems before the country are many, and their solution is becoming imperative; whilst the resources at the command of the university for drawing out and developing talent for their solution by research are conspicuously meagre, especially when compared with those of the other Dominions.”