EDUCATION POLICY.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXVIII, Issue 20988, 26 September 1931, Page 12

EDUCATION POLICY.

Sir, —The headmaster of the Otahuhn Junior High School has dubbed the suggestion, that restriction of free-plar® secondary education to those who Lava shown themselves mentally equipped to benefit by such education should be included among the economies of the Government, "reactionary." It can be so regarded only if it can be proved that free-place secondary education for all and sundry has been of benefit to tho children concerned, and to the Dominion; and that, one makes bold to say, will be very difficult to prove. Educationists know well that there are many children capable of benefiting by the elements of education given in the primary standards, but utterly incapable of absorbing any moro "book learning." Such children are merely wasting their time in secondary schools, and being a drag upon the progress of the work of the schools. If such children could be given post-primary vocational instruction, well and good. Tho most needed instruction of that sort is preparation for farm life, and the sort of work that is being done at Ruakura could well be developed to the benefit of the Dominion, and of the lads concerned. After all, the work of the schools is to prepare the scholars for taking their full part in the life of the community, in capacities for which nature has endowed them. The sort of "education" which takes a lad, fitted by birth and upbringing, to bo one of our primary producers, and gives him a distaste for country Ufa and a longing for the glamour of the city, to which his Auckland-education has introduced him for the first time, is of no real* service either to the lad himself or to his country. And it is by no ■ means "reactionary" to seek to stop the flow of our country lads into "coat and collar ' occupations in our towns. Neither is it ' reactionary" to seek to prevent the spoiling of. lads, better fitted by nature to work with their hands than with their heads, from overcrowding the market of city clerks, when the countryside is crying out for them, ready to give them the life of the open air and the close contact with nature likely to make men of them infinitely more surely than the life of the <}ffice. It is not to the credit of New Zealand education that so few of our •lads aro willing and ready to go on the land—so few that farmers greedily snap up all the English lads brought out- to fill the gaps caused by such unwillingness on the part of our own boys. And it would not be "reactionary," but really sound, progressive, policy, so to change our methods as to shut out lots of lads from a secondary education, from which neither they themselves nor the Dominion are likely to reap any benefit. Artifex Mindius.