UNIFIED CONTROL OF SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Southland Times, Issue 25357, 8 May 1944, Page 2

UNIFIED CONTROL OF SECONDARY SCHOOLS

Sir,—The letter of your correspondent “Common Sense” calls for some comment. I should like to know what he refers to by the encroaching of our high schools on technical school subjects. If he means the existence of woodwork instruction in the boys’ school, he should know that for more than 20 years a handcraft has been recognized as ..an essential element even in an education that is predominantly academic. Eton College itself has a splendidly equipped woodwork room. In all girls’ schools a home science kitchen is as essential a part of the equipment as the physics or chemistry laboratories. During the last 30 years the tendency has been quite in the opposite direction. Technical schools have gradually extended the range of their academic and professional courses so that many of them are indistinguishable from high schools. Combined schools might have some of the advantages mentioned by your correspondent, but they have at least two drawbacks. One is their tendency to be too large. The efficiency of a school is not proportional to its size, in spite of the American preference for schools of a thousand or more pupils. The ideal size is 350 to 450, a number which allows of sufficient variety of pupil and efficient class grading according to ability, while not being too large for the headmaster- to know every boy personally. This is very important. In a school of more than 500 pupils the individual boy is to the headmaster just a name on a list or a nameless wearer of the school uniform. No head can exert his personal influence individually in a school of this size. Even if separate combined schools for boys and girls were established here, they would still be too large. (It may be mentioned here that a “combined” school is one formed by amalgamating a technical and a high school and must not be confused with a “mixed” school, where both boys and girls are taught) The second drawback is that a combined school tends to develop with the emphasis either on the professional and examination side, or along lines that are mainly technical, according as the headmaster has a high school or a technical bias. I should like your correspondent to explain “the present nonsensical competition between the technical and the high schools.” Each school is serving a useful purpose in the town and pupils are free to attend the one that suits them. The only competition I know of is the wholly admirable and good-spirited variety that exists when teams meet on the football field or on the rifle range. PATER.