EXTENDING EDUCATION.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVIII, Issue 121, 21 April 1938, Page 2

EXTENDING EDUCATION.

ARE AA r E IN A RUT? (By Dip. Soc. Sc.) There was a time when a boy picked up from his father all the education he required. As life became more complicated the business of education was handed over to specialists. So arose teachers and schools. Teachers were to carry out a function which parents found themselves unable to cope with. As life becomes more and more complicated the work of the teachers increases and they demand a longer period of the child’s life. For the upper classes schooling lasts fifteen to twenty years now. And are the products of this schooling sufficiently well educated? Most certainly not. Then shall we add another five or ten years? Or is it time we took stock of the whole process ? If we are not careful we shall end up by having our childrerf start work at sixty instead of retiring. There is a fallacy somewhere and I suggest it is in thinking that education is for children only. Our children must be thoroughly educated even if they have to remain children. until they are old enough to have children attending school themselves. Must we not recognise, that childhood proper is all too short to give anything more than the beginnings of education ? There is something psychologically wrong about this endeavour to artificially prolong this period of childhood. Do what we will boys and girls insist upon regarding themselves as men and women when , their physiological growth is completed, and if -we deny them exercising the functions of manhood and womanhood we. are going to warp their lives. AA r e recognise the evil of keeping a boy tied to his mother’s apron strings. Is it because teachers do not wear aprons that we fail to see a similar danger in keeping him dependent upon his teacher? But this fallacy of regarding education purely as a preparation for life cuts another way too.' Not only does it lead to the cramming of too much teaching into the pre-vocational period, but it also leads to a neglect of education in later life. We have elaborate organisations for preparing our youth for problems which will arise years later, but practically nothing to help him to deal with problems when they actually come. Might it not be more economical and effective to defer the training until the problems arise? Let our young men and women enter adult life as soon as nature has endowed them with the capacities and instincts of adults. Don’t hold them back for any artificial course of education. But, on the other hand, do not let them run away with the idea that education is finished. Rather give them the idea that childhood is just the time when one acquires the tools of tion. Any serious education comes later. If the. preparatory process has been properly carried /out the young adult will be left with a desire for serious education. He will regard education as a privilege rather than as an irksome duty. It will be for him the means by which he can widen the scope of his ego, an instrument of self-realisation. AVliether it administers to vocational success or directly promotes his aesthetic enjoyment he will regard it not as something imposed from without but as something desirable whose quest is motivated from within. As I see it, then, the neglect of adult education is largely the result of the wrong type of education in earlier years. Yet in spite of this there is a growing demand for adult education. In its more amorphous form one sees this exemplified in the activities of the AVonien’s Institutes, AV.D.F.U., etc., while it crystalises out in inteuser form

in various schemes of university extension lectures of which the chief representative in this country is the AV.E.A. The name is perhaps unfortunate. r fhe word “worker” casts a stigma which repels many worthy people and has even led many ardent Socialists to eschew the organisation as a subtle attack on class consciousness. The fact remains, however, that the AV.E.A. is practically the only organisation for adult education, ill New Zealand. Two other organisations, are, however, entering the field and may prove factors of the greatest importance. Of these more later.