'FORM OF TYRANNY'

Evening Post, Volume CXXXIX, Issue 103, 3 May 1945, Page 4

'FORM OF TYRANNY'

TREND IN EDUCATION

PROFESSOR'S CRITICISM

P.A. AUCKLAND, May 2. Education in New Zealand today is threatened by a new, and, to my mind, particularly objectionable form of tyranny, a tyranny of enforced mediocrity," said Professor C. G. Cooper, Professor of Classics at Auckland University College, in an address to the Junior Chamber of Commerce this afternoon.

"The purpose which should inspire our educational reconstruction is well stated in the British White Paper of 1943," he said. "It should be 'to secure for children a happier childhood and better start in life, to ensure a fuller measure of education and opportunity for young people, >.nd to provide a means for all of developing the various talents with which they are endowed, and so enriching the inheritance of the country whose citizens they are. The new educational opportunities must not, therefore, be of a single pattern. It is just as important to achieve diversity as to ensure equality of educational opportunity.'" Professor Cooper said that unfortunately the truth of the above statement did not appear to have been recognised by those planning educational construction in New Zealand. The equality proposed by the authors of the New Zealand post-primary school curriculum report tended to be not true equality but uniformity. That was the first step towards regimentation. He condemned the rigidity with which it was proposed to impose a "common core" Upon all pupils, irrespective of their special aptitudes and ambitions. One effect of such an imposition would be to make it impossible for a pupil to take an academic course of a traditional and well-proved kind. He saw also a threat of enforced mediocrity in the prescriptions * proposed for Latin and Greek.