THE SCHOOL TO-DAY

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25458, 12 February 1944, Page 4

THE SCHOOL TO-DAY

The Minister of Education rightly emphasises, in his comment on the report of the Consultative Committee on the post-primary school curriculum, that it should receive the close attention not only of educationists, but of the general public. The Consultative Committee claims that the care of studies and activities which it would make mandatory in secondary schools contains “what any intelligent parent may expect a son or daughter to be given at school,” and it seems certainly desirable, therefore, that the parents and the public as a whole should sharpen their intelligence by contact with this 94-page opus when copies become available.' The people of the Dominion as individuals must, as much as any formal educational system, accept responsibility for the future direction of the boys and girls of to-day. They should know where present teaching methods are trending. and they could, by formulating their own practical conclusions on educational theory and practice, probably be of great assistance to the receptive teacher in the discharge of his task. The absence of a liaison between teachers and parents is a factor that makes for difficulty both in the school and in the home. It receives a special illustration in the Consultative Committee’s report in so far as it favours the teaching of biology in the postprimary schools, with a bias towards the human system, as a means of imparting sex education. The first sex knowledge should, as the committee recognises, come to young people in their homes, and certainly before they are of secondary school age. It is no doubt because they have reason to believe that parents shirk the responsibility of instruction, or feel incapable of undertaking it, that the members of the committee recommend courses in the schools. There are circumstances in which the task would be no less embarrassing—if it must be hedged about with inhibitions—in the school than in the home. Indeed, the ideal solution might be special classes in which parents could be told how to describe “the facts of life” to their children! This matter | is, however, quite incidental to a report which has, as its principal reference, the general school curriculum. Its recommendations here can be welcomed. There is a recognition, though apparently made with admirable circumspection, that the progress of the “ new education ” in New Zealand has tended towards chaos. Teachers have been entrusted in many instances with a breadth of choice in the curriculum

which has led them astray, either into blind alleys or into the adoption of vague rather than pei'haps more limited but solid objectives. The effect of curriculum looseness on both the teachers themselves, who may realise they have lost direction, and upon the pupils, can be unfortunate and even disastrous. Tactfully as it puts the case, the Consultative Committee aims to bring education in the secondary schools back to a hard fundamental basis of instruction in essential subjects, with a wide choice to meet pupils’ special aptitudes beyond the care of studies. It appears, from the summarisation of the report, that the Consultative Committee is, as might be expected of it, fully seized of a fact, which for some time had escaped the comprehension of a proportion of modern educationists, beguiled by pleasant theories, that there is, in the old phrase, no royal road to learning, nor are there short cuts to real knowledge. Training in citizenship, in sex, in music, and in basket-making are, admittedly, all desirable aims which come within the scope of the educational system, but the schools have still to bring pupils to a certain stage of proficiency in an essential range of studies, and the system must, whatever processes of modernisation it undergoes, provide a standard of instruction and of attainment in these old-fashioned basic subjects pending the era of subconscious conditioning in Mr Aldous Huxley’s brave new world.