SECONDARY EDUCATION

Southland Times, Issue 22011, 10 May 1933, Page 5

SECONDARY EDUCATION

QUESTION OF FREE PLACES. MR ALDRIDGE’S ADDRESS. (Per United Press Association.) Wellington, May 9. “Until thirty years ago,” said Mr W. G. Aldridge, M.A., in his presidential address at the annual meeting of the New Zealand Technical School Teachers’ Association to-day, “few could receive free secondary education. Scholarships were few and other free places fewer and of brief duration. Then there was a sudden outpouring of enthusiasm in favour of increasing the opportunities of this sort, and of relating them more definitely to the realities of life. The results were felt first in the technical schools then in existence and subsequently caused additional technical schools to spring up, finally embracing high schools also. No real limitation was set to the number of free places provided, the ideal being to place education within the reach of all. The ideal was splendid, but in practice rather indiscriminating.. The first phase, one of boundless faith and of broadening opportunity, has worn itself out.

“I think,” the president continued, “the time of criticism has arrived. It is easy at this stage to fall into two errors. Some would restrict the expenditure on education and others would impose a written examination test.”

The problem, however, could really be solved as simply as that, he said. To the critic who believed that education opportunities were too wide in New Zealand, he would admit that many pupils either stayed at school too short a time to receive real benefit, or spent too much time in a course in which they could not hope to succeed. He would commend any efforts to secure a saving of public money by remedying those two faults, but on many counts he would urge that the free places system should remain. Parents had an absolute faith in high school education. Social workers and thinkers were unanimous that grave ills were in store for a country which provided neither discipline nor employment for its youth, and keen students of industry proclaimed that New Zealand always needed more workers of greater skill, whereas fewer learners than ever were now being trained outside the schools.

He then proceeded to outline a scheme of examinations, which, he submitted, offered a much needed middle course between the over-generous gift of senior free places and the alternative of nothing at all and was in no real sense a departure from the spirit of the present regulations.