SCHOOL TRAINING

Evening Star, Issue 22350, 28 May 1936, Page 14

SCHOOL TRAINING

AGRICULTURE, WOODWORK, AND HOME SCIENCE VALUE TO THE CHILDREN The value of agricultural instruction and woodwork and home science training to school children is clearly shown in the Otago Education Board’s report for 1935, which gives extracts from the reports furnished by the senior agricultural instructor and the supervisor. “ Studies with environmental materials as provided by the farm, garden, and outdoor world generally feature with increasing educative effect in the majority of schools in the province,” writes the instructor.- “ With the background of experience and interests thkt have been acquired from contact with his environment the child is led to an intelligent and sympathetic interest in the world about him. In the process the training of eye, hand, and mind gives him a sense of the value of his own physical and mental efforts, and also an understanding of the principles underlying many of the arts of modern farm and garden practice. “ It is now the general experience of teachers that this motivation of study through the child’s interests induces responses in a manner impossible in the absence of this urge. “ The number of schools whose grounds reflect the justifiable pride of teachers, pupils, and school committees is annually increasing, and in this relation appreciative reference must again be made to the continued co-operation of the schools enumerated in last year’s report. The supplies of trees, shrubs, and seeds distributed from these centres during the year have materially assisted the development of the improvement projects at the recipient schools.” In 15 centres throughout the province 1,940 boys and 1,941 girls received instruction in woodwork and home science. In the course of his report the supervisor writes;—“The activities associated with training in woodwork and home science provide the necessary counterpart of subjects which make a purely academic appeal. Indeed, for the hand-minded pupil his counterpart frequently proves the more effective instrument for intellectual For all pupils, however, manual training possesses potentialities which invest it with particular educative value. _ Of not the least significance in this relation is its contribution to the development of knowledge and skill, whose application to the employment of leisure hours opens up ways of solving what is already a more or less acute sociological problem. f> Noteworthy developments since last report have been the equipment of a new manual training centre in the Moray Plane School, Dunedin, and the building of a new woodwork room at Cromwell Centre. The opening of the rooms at Moray Place at the beginning of the present year relieved the congestion which had existed at two of the urban centres, and the totally different conditions provided in the new room at Cromwell must inevitably induce a favourable reaction on the work in that district. The board appreciates the department’s recognition of the urgent need for these developments, and looks forward to similar consideration of its application for new woodwork rooms at Milton and Owaka Centres.