TIME WELL SPENT

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 50, 27 August 1925, Page 4

TIME WELL SPENT

It was announced by the Minister of Education yesterday that parents next year would be given a chance to send their children to the high schools at the age of eleven or twelve years. He foreshadowed other changes in the secondary and University education system, including the early disappearance of the undue domination of the matriculation examination. These are .problems which were investigated by the University Commission, and, while we are anxious to see changes made, we think that action should not be taken before that Commission's report has been published and discussed. It has long been contended by the persons best acquainted with the operation of the present secondary system that it does not provide a perfect type of advanced education. Many boys and girls who spend a year or two in a high school derive little benefit from the time. Some are actually harmed because they are hindered from entering occupations for which they are best suited or even diverted from those occupations. We fully support extended education, provided it is education. Putting the child into a high school for a year or two is not necessarily education, and it may be bad for the child and the school. Whether these years are from eleven to thirteen or fourteen to sixteen there is the same danger. That is why w6 desire to have the system thoroughly reconsidered, in the light of whatever assistance is afforded by the University Commission's report, before it is made all-embracing.