EDUCATIONAL AIMS

Evening Star, Issue 17599, 2 March 1921, Page 8

EDUCATIONAL AIMS

A MINISTER’S GOAL. The Hon. C. J. Parr gave a broad interpretation of the duties of a Minister of Education when be spoke at the Opawa (Christchurch) School on Saturday, He said that he felt that his duties were much wider than generally was believed. His first duty was to see that the health of the little ones was preserved. He wanted them to be sound, healthy young animals. He would like to have spacious buddings like the new Opawa School all over New Zealand. But the final object of an educational system should be to teach children to think clearly and intelligently. If he as Minister of Education taught boys and girls to think clearly and intelligently he would have accomplished his object. Experts and educationists would give in inflated language half a dozen goals for the educational system; _ but his goal would make them"good citizens ’of the Empire. Teachers should implant a love of reading in the beast of every boy and girl. If they induced them to read good books, the wholesome literature of tho Empire, the splendid works in their own tongue, they would accomplish something for each boy and girl who passed through tbeir hands. They would open to those young minds a world that words could not describe. If they, by sound instruction in tbo “three r’s,” taught children to think clearly and intelligently, and if, by encouraging them to love literature, they induced soymd, healthy reading, they would make the people of New Zealand worthy of the finest country in the world. He would not deny that New Zealand's educational system had its faults; but it was something to its credit that it gave every boy and girl a chance to rise to the highest position in the country. Any child, through the educational system, might climb to any position his or her ambition demanded.