EDUCATION NEEDS.

Evening Star, Issue 20483, 14 May 1930, Page 8

EDUCATION NEEDS.

It is easy to believe that the Hon. Mr Atmore has not been responsible for the “long delay,” censured by the Now Zealand Teachers’ _ Institute, in introducing his reorganisation of the education system. Mr _Atmore’ s mistake was quite evidently made in talking so much and so confidently about reorganisation at the beginning of his Ministerial career, as if he expected that it could be performed in a day. If such expectation was in his mind, born of the enthusiasm of the “new broom,” he will have learned since that the system is much too big and too intricate, involving altogether too many opinions, to bo so soon transformed. Mr Atmore talked more in a few weeks about his ideas for the system than his last predecessor had done in years, and he talked a lot of sense, though his statements were made often in too sweeping tex-ms for those who could follow them mainly to follow, them all lihe

way. That performance has lagged behind his rather exuberant promises is not his fault but his misfortune, and it would appear fi’om his lively defence that the Educational Institute was the last body which should have made that a ground of reproach to his department. It was the institute, according to the Minister, which asked him to defer a definite statement of the Government’s intentions till more opinions had been sought on the matter, and the endorsement by other bodies of this claim for all views to be heard led quite naturally to the mission given to the Education Committee, which has caused the longest delay. We are not sure that the committee’s report will bring much more knowledge or wisdom to bear on the issue than if Mr Atmore had handled it himself. Its members, for the most part, were not educationists in any special sense. They scampered through the country, seeing something, but only the least, of every educational institution in the shortest time. They will be fortunate if they know more of the scenes of their visits than Miss Johnson of the islands of Malaya when her journey is finished. Mr Atmore himself feels pride in the fact that he has visited 1,600 out of 2,600 primary schools since he took office. It is possible that ho would have learned as much from visiting, at more leisure, a well-selected score.

The Education Committee’s report will soon be made known, and it is to be hoped that the mixed membership of the committee will have the result of securing for it, when it comes before the House, the non-partisan consideration that is to be desired. Mr Atmore has pleaded that education should be more practicable, that it should give a stronger bias towards agriculture. The difficulty is that there are courses already in agriculture in a fair number of schools, but they are not the most popular courses; nor will they easily be so until fanning becomes, more profitable than it has been in recent years. Mr Atmore is also a firm believer in the primary school course ending at the age of eleven plus, but that principle is now universally conceded. He hopes much from a new unity in the local control of education, and that promises plain advantages, though the fusing of education boards, high school boards, and technical school boards into single bodies will also have its formidable difficulties. The Minister’s predecessors were not so idle in these matters as might be gathered from his references to them. They produced a syllabus, which is now in force, and which expresses more than one of the ideas for which he contends, though it may not carry them so far as ho would do. At the annual conference of the Technical School Teachers’ Association yesterday its president (Mr Fraser, of Hamilton) mad© a strong attack upon the excessive influence of the matriculation examination upon secondary school courses, and Mr Atmore, presumably, would be one of the strongest sympathisers with his indictment. But that admitted evil is also on the way, we can hope, to mitigation, if not abolition. The Senate of the University two years ago endorsed the principle of accrediting as an alternative for the matriculation examination for the pupils of secondary schools. A committee of the Senate was to confer with the department and other parties interested as to the best way of bringing this change into effect. Presumably the conferences have been held, and the whole matter will come up, in the most practicable form, at the meeting of the Senate which began to-day in Wellington. Accrediting for matriculation, when it comes to pass, should leave the way much clearer for Mr Fraser’s desire of a leaving exhibition, equal to that hall mark, for pupils not proceeding to the University, which would he given by the Education Department on a programme of work suitable for all types of school.