BOY AND GIRL LABOUR.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 16358, 30 September 1913, Page 4

BOY AND GIRL LABOUR.

TO THE EDITOR. Sir, —I was pleased to read in your issue of Tuesday last your remarks on "Boy and Girl Labour,"' as I found therein another peg on which to hang a few remarks on our Scout scheme of training. That there is a great dearth of boy and girl labour all over the dominion no one who has studied tho question will deny, but that the quality of such as we have is also wanting requires some explanation. I respectfully submit that our education 'system is primarily to blame tor the lack of interest our young people take in any form of serious work. Far too much time and energy are given to instruction and far too little to education. 'Hie teacher docs practically all the work, the pupils being regarded as absorbent, taking everything in and giving nothing back, except: in cases where instruction is poured in so fast that much of it runs over. This species of cram has been condemned by loading educationists for years, and though great improveiDents havo been made in methods, we are still far from the goal. Until we have a more clastic syllabus and more rational methods of teaching, ihe products of our schools will remain as they are to-day—lamentably unsatisfactory.

If Scout methods of treating the various subjects of the syllabus were adopted by teachers and approved by our Education Department, remarkable results would soon bo apparent. Pupils would fake a new and intelligent interest in their work, their initiative and their individuality would be encouraged, and as a result they would refuse all help except when experience failed them. The normal child likes to do things. Even the baby "ants to feed itself in preference to being fed. If. therefore, this spirit he encouraged during school life, the boy or girl will become indeixmdent and self-reliant, taking a proper pride in all he or .she has to do and a just pride in the -unaided accomplishment.of it. This applies' also to writing. Our education authorities demand a uniform style throughout a school, regardless of the fact that by so doing they are trying to coerce individual character. If pupils in the fourth and upper standards were encouraged to adopt a style they liked, a neat, well-formed and legible hand would be the result, providing the teacher insisted upon the style chosen being carefully followed out in every detail. When the pupils left school they would quite naturally retain their stylo and not, as now, drop into a. wretched scrawl as soon as they are free to write as they like. In our primary schools there is also so much to do that the teacher has little time to devote to character training, without which no boy will ever be worth his salt in the labour market.— I am, etc.,

D. COSSGROVE.