AGE NO DISABILITY.

Hawera Star, Volume XLV, 11 January 1926, Page 10

AGE NO DISABILITY.

A NEW YORK SCHOOL. EXTENDED TIME EUR LEARNING. An educational centre where age is not regarded as a disability to the student is being developed in New York City. It is known as the Wylie Forum of advanced education, and has been reorganised and enlarged under the direction of Elizabeth R. Wylie to permit increased application of this guiding idea in its work in advanced education and re-education. The belief that youth alone is the ideal time for education is misleading, according to Miss Wylie’s experience oi ihe nasi several years in supervising tin 1 education of both youth and adults in many branches of learning. ■ln mental life there is no age.’’ Miss Wylie said. "There is simply moie or less experience of living. And whi'n we regard, education as the unfolding or leading out of the individual to knowledge, ol life, rather than as a mere cramming with academic lore, age and experience become one, so that the greater a man’s experience is the more educated lie is and better able be is to understand life. 'Thus age. with its unrealised and unrevealed talent, is an asset which enables us to begin a career at any time and to understand life in any phase. "Directed mental training virtually ceases when the student leaves college only because of social and economic conditions and not because the mind is fully developed or incapable of further training. The very title of graduation, ‘commencement/ emphasises this; the business man taking the young graduate into his firm to ‘teach him the business’ recognises tliis; and the student or business man who seeks further training in some subject which he has not mastered in the universtiy or in business is admitting the same thing. It is reflected in the expression: ‘This took me a lifetime to learn.’ “Books are the accepted educational media for youth because youth passes from one educational centre to another and a gauge is needed. But books emphasise the past, and many of Ihe subjects taught in school are disciplinary only and must he discarded alteriv n rd. Li life’s school there is no grading by ages, there are no books, there is only experience to teach us, and'the method is by contact of man with man. It is not until one has completed this school process of learning by rote and stepped out into lire that one does begin to learn, and from that time the older one becomes the more one can bring to the process or real learning.” Miss Wylie puts this theory in practice in' the forum by providing instruction in the -solution of the immediate problems, social, commercial, political or economic, of those who come to her. In a sense the forum is an educational brokerage; it supplies the means of obtaining authentic Gaining in any subject. The instructors are not professional pedagogues. _ but men ■m l women successful in business, the professions, the arts and society, who have the ability and desire to share their experience with others No lectures are given, no recitations are required, and books are used for reference only.