EDUCATIONAL AFFAIRS

Northern Advocate, 3 July 1928, Page 6

EDUCATIONAL AFFAIRS

FREEDOM FOR TEACHERS,

DECISION OF INSTITUTE

(Pur Press Association —Copyright.)

WELLINGTON, This Day

The executive of the New Zealand Educational Institute has placed on record the following expression of opinion regarding the new syllabus:

The committee considers that increasing the freedom of the teacher, as regards the selection of matter and teaching methods, is the most important issue arising out of the new syllabus. Teaching is not a mechanical process. It is a vital one dependent upon interaction of personalities. JA teacher’s personality, as the controlling factor, must be given very wide discretion to adjust itself to problems arising out of the direetion of the educational process. Any tendency of prescriptions towards hard and fast standardisation of aims and methods must check and defeat what is fundamentally an inspirational process. The seizing and developing of cues as they arise out of a given conjuncture in instruction essential to the safeguarding of our educational system is now the scope to which its servants are restricted by regulations, hut the service is so selected and trained that it is qualified. while broadly adhering to the spirit and intention of the national system, to exercise a very great degree of persona! initiative.

The teaching service 23 years ago, when the late Mr Hogbeu’s syllabus was promulgated, was nor, in general, qualified for self-determination. It did not desire it. Today a better selected, better trained and better educated profession is qualified, and puts such self-determination first among the reforms it urges. While welcoming the indications in the advance copy of the new syllabus that this concession of increased freedom to teachers is much in the miaul of the department, this committee of the Institute points to the existing system of inspection as needing searching investigation and drastic alteration if the freedom, vital to true scholastic progress, is to bo secured. At present it feels that the general tendency is to make originality and enterprise run the gauntlet, and to bestow rewards upon results of a kind conventionally approved. It argues that the opposite should be the case if the spirit of an experiment so often asked for by the director is to become really manifest. It therefore respectfully requests the department to confer with the Institute re the inspection system as it has existed in the past. The executive endorses opinion expressed in the preparatory note to the “English Handbook of Suggestions for Teach-

ers. ” Tlu 1 only uniformity of practice desired in the teaching of elementary schools is that each teacher shall think for himself and work out for himself such methods of teaching as may use his powers to the best, ad vantage and be best suited to the particular needs and conditions of the school.”