ORDERED FREEDOM

Dominion, Volume 30, Issue 254, 23 July 1937, Page 13

ORDERED FREEDOM

Chief Development in English Education LINK WITH REALITY ■ “In the last 20 years, the chief movement in English education has been toward ordered freedom,” said AIL G. T. Hankin, representative of the English Board of Education, in a New Education Fellowship Conference address at the Wellington Technical College Hall last night on “Educational Trends in England.” Mr. W. A. Armour, headmaster or Wellington College, presided. One of the problems had been, the lecturer said, to reduce the educational system to order. They had come to look upon education as a continuous process, and they had done their best to get the system ordered right through from the infant to the secondary school. The great difficulty had been to effect the right transfer from the one school to the other. “It is not so much the changes that astonish me as the rate of change, ’ Mr. Hankin said, in quoting advances as represented in official documents of tile English Board of Education. The question of homework had caused a lot of excitement in England lately, and the board had suggested that the amount of homework given to children of various ages should be very carefully regulated. This excitement had been due to two causes, first health, and, secondly, opportunity for leisure imd social life. “We believe in approaching the problem of speech and language from the point of view of speech and language, therefore we teach our grammar very largely incidentally,” Mr. Hankin said, on the subject of the formal English grammar lesson. The analytical approach was, he hoped, disappearing. The approach was from the real, living spoken language. Another feature of the trends m England had been the enormous increase in the importance placed on art and music and the aesthetic side of life. Then there was the connection of education with reality, and by reality he did not mean technical instruction. There was a great danger of slipping from reality to technical instruction. The tendency in England was to keep education as broad as possible for as long as possible. There was no desire to cut down general education and to give technical training too early. There was, of course, a difference in the extent to which these aims had been attained,, but that was the price they had to pay for freedom. “If I could live under Italian skies and lay down my own law. 1 should be spending millions on education,” Mr. Hankin said, in listing the things that were still wanted—smaller classes, bettertrained teachers, better buildings and better equipment.