THE TEACHER’S TASK

Dominion, Volume 27, Issue 188, 8 May 1934, Page 8

THE TEACHER’S TASK

Making Education Safe For Democracy NEWER SOCIAL IDEAL “Is there auy better service we can render, than to make education safe for democracy?” asked Miss M. !’■ Magill, in the course of her presidential address to the conference of the New Zealand Educational Institute last evening. “The fitness of a cog in tne social mechanism, the passive acceptance of prevailing standards, is wholly opposed to the spirit of true democratic traditions, but not. I fear, to the practice. There can be no fitting of the child into a fore-ordained groove. He must make his own plans. Our institutions must be modified or discarded with the growth of experience.” This made education a much more difficult matter. It was easy to train a child for a specific function or plan. The life of the next generation would be different from ours in ways that we could not foresee. How then could we prepare for it. and best provide for the creation of new standards in accordance with new conditions and new needs? Schoolroom practices must be brought into line with the newer social ideal, and to bring about the conditions for development of the qualities needed was the stupendous task of the teachers. “I say with all the conviction possible.” continued Miss Magill, “that the children in the schools are the most important people in any country. This ip the world we have made for them. A major part of our energies, of our resources. should be used in equipping them for dealing with the problems we have created. We must surround them with beauty—so that they will accept beauty as the natural order. We must introduce them to the soul-satisfaction of art. We must give them those means of self-expression which will them to be.’in the schools, the real people that we would hare them to be in the larger society later on. “The teacher of to-day is called upon to be a disciple bearing the tidings of the hope for the world that lies in education—combating, the subversive influences which bid fair to wreck civilisation. He must have such conditions as will enable him to call his soul his own. To him must be accorded that freedom—that dignity which the future citizen in his charge must have. He must have the conditions which make for his well-being. His self-regarding instinct must not be thwarted. He must have in his life the order, the beauty, that he envisages in theirs, that opportunity for culture, for art. for being a complete person.”