SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Evening Star, Issue 19025, 21 August 1925, Page 6

SECONDARY SCHOOLS

PRINCIPALS AND ASSISTANTS CONFER ONE UNIVERSAL TYPE [Pkk United .Press Association.] WELLINGTON, August 21. The combined conference of 'principal* and assistants at secondary schools was continued to-day. Mr Caughley, Director of Education, repudiated the idea that secondary education was being given to too largo a number of students. The wider life of to-day made increased higher education imperative. University education was far from perfect, but the middle area, involving secondary school problems, must be dealt with first. The schools must be modelled to meet the needs of every type of hoy and girl. A wrong educational diet might be the cause of a boy’s failure at secondary work, but the speaker did not agree that a different typo of school should bo established for different needs. General education should bo provided in one universal typo of school. In purely technical schools general education was liable to suffer. When ho spoke of combination be did not mean the setting up of machinery and plants in all secondary schools. These things attracted boys naturally and detracted from interest in general education; but there should lie some form of handwork taught in every secondary school. It was essential that boys should be taught, the skilful use of tools before being allowed to handle machines. He confessed he had changed his mind regarding junior high schools, and their articulation with the existing system of primary form of instruction was not long ahead. If the greatest argument in favor of the junior high school was that it caught the pupil on the threshold of adolescence, when receptivity was greatest, and if a cleavage were to be made between the primary school and the junior high school, that was the point at which to make it. It would be impossible in small centres not to attach the junior high school to the secondary school, as apart they would be too weak to stand, and united they offered the benefit or a full six years’ course. In some of the larger centres the position was different. The following remits were carried; — “ That the Senate of the University of New Zealand be requested to provide and permit the use of four-figure logarithmic tables in the matriculation examination.” “That, in the opinion of this association, in the entrance scholarship examination 300 marks should be allotted to geography instead of 200.” “That the arithmetic paper set m matriculation of 1924. was most unsuitable.”