RURAL EDUCATION AT LAST

Evening Post, Volume XCIII, Issue 29, 2 February 1917, Page 6

RURAL EDUCATION AT LAST

Statements made by the TVC'msters for Education and for Agriculture show that tho two Departments are very wisely co-operating in the matter, of agricultural .education, and that a joint scheme has been evolved for the training of youths aged from 16 to 20 years- From these statements it is gathered that the place of training—o? at any rate the principal, place—will be the . Weraroa (Levin) Experimental Farm, to be known hereafter as the Central Development Farm; ' and that the training will be both theoretical and practical. The students, it seems, 'will be of two kinds — students and student-assistants. Each will receive £50 a yeair, but while'the student will receive his money from the Education Department in the form of a bursary (a £20 bursary with £30 boarding allowance), the student-assistant.will be paid by the Department of Agriculture a commencing salary of £50. The student class ■will provide the agricultural teachers of tho future, and the student-assistant class should supply the Department of Agriculture with its future exports. If we have understood correctly the scheme, as outlined by the two Ministers, a young man, before entering the new training course, must have matriculated. From a basis of matriculation, plus this training, itf -is hoped to produce men qualified as either agricultural experts or teachers; or, to use the words .of the Minister for Agriculture, "a supply of men highly trained to deal with New 'Zealand's special agricultural' problems. "-

The scheme is not sufficiently definite to wan-ant more than tentative conclusions, but it would appear that it embraces only one step in the ladder. For all the steps one must refer to the much more comprehensive report (published some months ago) of a committee of the Education Council, which includes': (1) The primary school, where the ground-woi-k is laid by nature study and.the school garden; (2) an intermediate course, of a character too detailed to be reprinted here; (3) a course at a farm school or State experimental farm, which seems to bear some relation to the proposal now under review. And probably the fourth' stage would be a university course at some university college possessing the much-talked-of Chair of Education—though this phase the committee does not seem to have explored. Comparing the whole scheme with the proposal of the two Departments, it is to be noted that the. .Departments will proceed without the second and the fourth steps in the ladder. The primary school course (No. 1) already exists, .it any rate in some places, but we can see no evidence of the intermediate course outlined by the committee, and to our mind, the main question now at issue is whether the Departments can obtain their quota? of suitably-equipped sixteen-year-olds without the existence of a preparatory intermediate course. This question is raised in no contentious spirit. Possibly the committee's intermediate course would be a costly Or' a difficult one to arrange ; and if the State Farm course represents the line of least resistance—if, with the collaboration of the high schools and district high schools, it can obtain v miiikiency of syitabje. jusuorial to work pn«-»we jvould..

approach the expedient with sympathy, and only with such criticism as might be helpfuL * .

When Sii James Wilson proposed to start <it once with a Cbaur of Agriculture at Victoria University College, believing tttait the tree of agricultural education miglit be made to grow from the top downwards, we favourably viewed even ttot experiment as being at any rate a means of - getting things done." After many .yeans of desultory talk about agricultural education, any reasonably possible scheme, however oartial, may lie welcomed, as a beginning, and therefore the alliance of the two Departments, to produce expects and teachers wbo will become the backbone of. the future system, should be hailed as .a definite advance. It will lift higher agricultural, education from the realm of theory to that -of fact, and in a, primary producing country like New Zeaiand that development is long overdue.