THE NEW EDUCATION.

Otago Witness, Issue 3882, 7 August 1928, Page 73

THE NEW EDUCATION.

DR VAN DER LEEUW’S IMPRESSIONS. WELLINGTON, July 30. A recognised authority and lecturer on the subject of education, Dr J. J. Van Der Leeuw, who has just returned to Wellington after a lecturing tour, remarked to-day that in a young country like New Zealand there was a wonderful chance to put into practice the precepts of the new education—a chance which, however, he was afraid was not being used to full advantage. “ There is, as far as I can see,” he remarked, “ very little advance along the lines of the new education. In the new education there is no uniformity, the individuality of the child being the paramount consideration. One of the curses of so called education has been the manufacture of square pegs to fit round holes. What else could you expect? A class of 40 are all moulded in the same way, and when the time comes for them to chose a vocation they do not know where to turn. With the new education a child grows into its vocation without being conscious of it. A teacher is too often rated according to his examination achievements. Examinations there must be, but they should come last. Choose out your born teacher—and you can see dozens of them around you every day in all walks of life—and he can pick up the technique of teaching later.” Dr Van Der Leeuw said that parents were chiefly to blame for the fetish of examinations. Practically every schoolmaster was against them. There was much too much work for examinations and too little for real life. But comparatively few parents worried much about by whom their children were to be educated, they just sent them to school. “ How many people for instance,” asked Dr Van Der Leeuw, “ inquire whether corporal punishment is used in the school to which their children are going? This is no fad of mine. Ask any psychologist or educationist of note and you will hear that there is no greater evil than corporal punishment which is a survival of the old system of education. It is tolerated now in very few countries, and it is all nonsense to say that it is sometimes necessary. If a teacher cannot keep discipline without it he is not fit to be a teacher. Neither is it fair to the New Zealand or Australian boy to say that he is different and needs Corporal punishment as some do say, because he is not, and I know, because I have taught them. The visitor said that he would have thoroughly enjoyed his trip had it been summer and not winter. “ Why you people of New Zealand want to make martyrs of yourself I cannot imagine,” he remarked. “At many of my lectures the audience were wrapped up in rugs and had hotwater bottles. Even then they seemed to be suffering. I, on the platform, could have neither a rug nor a hot water bottle, and it is not considered the thing to lecture in an overcoat, so I just froze.” It was not a question of the extreme cold of the climate, Dr Van Der Leeuw pointed out; but of a lack of heating. At the cost of a pound or two practically any hall could have a stove put into it; but apparently that was not the custom of this country. It might seem a small thing in itself, but the winter months were supposed to be the lecturing months; but what result could be expected when the lecturer’s brain was numbed with cold and the audience was suffering likewise? Canadians used to temperatures 30 -or 40 degrees below zero had told him that they too suffered from the cold of New Zealand’s public buildings. It was important to remedy this defect in our heating arrangements as the time was coming when Americans would come here in the winter, especially when they could fly here in a few days instead of as now taking three weeks in a ship. Dr Van Der Leeuw said that he was lecturing in one hall belonging to a friendly society. The notice board outside proudly displayed the fact that the society’s capital amounted to over £1,000,000. “ I told them when I began my lecture in a distinctly frigid atmosphere that I thought that they might spare one out of those £1,000,000 in providing a stove for their hall. It seemed a new idea to them.” Dr Van Der Leeuw added that the American had learned how on a small income to make himself far more comfortable than the New Zealander had. It was quite right to pay attention to physical comforts as long as they were not the all in all.