EDUCATION PROBLEMS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXVII, Issue 17862, 7 August 1918, Page 6

EDUCATION PROBLEMS.

The education conference opened in the Canterbury College Hall last evening is the most important gathering of the kind ever held in this part of the Dominion and probably in the whole Dominion. It seems to have grown out of a suggestion from tho Technical College Board that certain administrative questions should be considered in conference, but its scope is now wide enough to cover all problems of education and the relations between the various education authorises in this district are assigned a very minor place. There are plenty of indications of tho development of a new movement in education in New Zealand, and wo may regard this conference as one of the signs of tho times. Its work will be followed with keen interest by a community that has always been warn in its sympathy with every effort to advance tho cause of education and that is now beginning to concern itself actively with tho manner in which the national system is being administered. What is most needed at tho present time is the shaping of a definite programme of reform, a tangible scheme that can bo grasped by tho public and that will bo treated by thorn, and consequently by Parliament, as an urgent question of practical politics. Movements that are ill defined mature slowly. The Educational Institute just now is engaged in a highly important campaign to stimulate public interest in educational reform, and it is pointing the way to tho right amendment of the primary system, but we should be sadly disappointed if its earnest, patriotic efforts were to produce no more than the addition of a few thousand pounds to the voto for education. It is verynecessary that public interest should bo stimulated, that the people should be made to understand where our national system is weak and in what respects it is badly administered; but it is necessary also that the men and women who are concerned in the work of education in every and any capacity should, out of their experience, frame a programme that the Parliament of the country will have to endorse and that the Government will have to accept in order to satisfy the demands of the people. This conference will be able ,to lend most useful assistance in tlie movement. No doubt the example of Christchurch will bo followed in the other centres, for the now interest in education problems is by no means confined to one part of the Dominion, and if that is the case the Board of Governors of Canterbury College will more than ever bo entitled to the gratitude of the r —-munity for its action in bringing the delegates together.