AIMS OF EDUCATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVI, Issue 20255, 15 May 1929, Page 17

AIMS OF EDUCATION.

VISION OF THE FUTURE.; IDEAL OF THE TEACHERS. EVOLUTION OF A SYSTEM. A vision of the future, based on the Ideal of an educated nation, was presented liv Mr. A. J. G. Hall, of Auckland, president of the New Zealand Educational Institute, when he delivered his presidential address at the opening session of the institute's annual conference in Wellington on Monday. Mr. Hall referred to the passing of the Education Act in 1877. In the following year there came into operation a universal system of education —free, secular, :ind compulsory—which was a hold step for a country not yet. 40 years old to take. But withal the scheme had been a modest scheme, as seen with eves looking hack on it from a distance of half a century. It had not been so much a system of education as a system of schooling. The word education had a different meaning in those days from the meaning it had at the present time. Though every child had to go to school, lie had been obliged to slay there only until reaching the fourth standard, and if he attended four days a week he satisfied the requirements of the compulsion of those days. The teachers of those days, said Mr. Hall, had been mostly untrained, overworked, and underpaid; tho schools had been of tho poorest description; the staffs had been altogether too small and largely composed of pupil teachers; the training colleges in a few years after their opening had been closed for reasons of economy; there had been a rigidly prescribed syllabus with which every teacher and every pupil had to strive by might and main to cope, for the demon of "percentage passes" had been abroad in the land; a good playground had been a very rare thing. Dawn of a Better Day. A little more than halfway through the period under review, said Mr. Hall, the educational skies began to brighten. The period about the year 1905 was hardly less important than the great year of 1877. Two years before that the colonial scale of staffs and salaries had delivered the first great blow against the evil of large classes. The new syllabus of those clays gave the teacher freedom of classification —up to a point —and freedom to draw up, under inspectorial supervision, his own scheme of work. These freedoms to the teachers brought an even greater freedom for the pupils in the form of free places in the secondary schools for those who were worthy according to the standard—the proficiency standard of that time. The free-place winners were many and the free places were few, whence arose the need for the network of secondary schools, technical schools, and district high schools. Tho effect of the changes that were then introduced, Mr. Hall went on to say, was seen to-day in the crowds that thronged the doors of the post-primary schools at the opening of each new year, ■ in the thousands who were following the lamp of learning by means of night schools and correspondence classes and private classes, and especially in the overflowing numbers that crowded the university colleges. After reviewing the progress made since 1905, Mr. Hall said that there never had been a time when so many people were interested in education, appreciatively and intelligently interested, as to-day. It was not merely a matter of membership of a school committee or education board, though that itself was something to the good. There was a growing number of people who had a conception of what real education was and might be, and who were sensitive to tho need for culture. Possibilities of the Future. Turning to the possibilities of the future, Mr. Hall said one of the first and most obvious developments would be found in the victory of real education over mass instruction. The movement for smaller classes was irresistible, and present expectations would be seriously disappointed if, by the time the institute was celebrating its jubilee, the president of that day was not able to rejoice with his fellow-teachers in at last being given the opportunity to "educate" instead of "instruct." One very probable result of the enlarging of the scope of the individual pupil would be something in the nature of a return to the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. Such a development would make great demands upon the teachers. The old system of the large class and the rigid syllabus and the individual examination was full of evils for the victims of it in tho classes, but it was less exacting, except in a physical sense, upon the teacher. "Given a good physique and a strong right arm and a firm will, he could drive his team, and at the end of the year he could deliver tho goods—such goods as ho was asked to deliver," said Mr. Hall. "The goods that the teacher of the future will be nsked to deliver will be of a different kind, and there will be little need for the strong right arm and the driving power. His need will be for a wide range of knowledge in all sorts of subjects, and, what will be of more importance, a sympathetic insight into child nature and the ways of working of the child mind."