BRITISH AND N.Z. UNIVERSITIES

Southland Times, Issue 25739, 1 August 1945, Page 4

BRITISH AND N.Z. UNIVERSITIES

TEACHING SYSTEMS COMPARED

Education, properly defined, was a process of bringing out, not of cramming in, said Mr L. F. Moller in an address at the weekly luncheon of the Invercargill Rotary Club yesterday. Its function was to teach people to think rather than to fill their minds with undigested, often indigestible, facts.

Mr Moller recalled his own experience of studying law at Otago University, where in his day lectures followed set routines, and with a few bright and honourable exceptions, offered no stimulus to thought. Students sat, or sometimes slept, through dreary lecture' periods, and then about six weeks before examination time, they retired, amidst dressing gowns, coffee, and icepacks, for an intensive cramming in order to pack their minds as much as possible of the information that would enable them to secure passes.

Mr Moller compared this with the experience he was fortunate enough to liave of Oxford in 1935-38. There the system was entirely different. The method of teaching was-tutorial, which meant that students went in batches of from two to eight once a week to, their tutor. They would go along at, say, 5.30 p.m. and sit in easy chairs round a fire, talking about the subject they had been given the previous week. LEARNED TO THINK By a masterly technique of teaching theix- tutor encouraged them to discuss cases from the point of view of whether they were right or wrong, regardless of what the highest authorities had ruled. Opinions, no matter how outrageous they might seem, were examined in the light of reason. They learned to think for themselves and the tutor was not above learning from his pupils. In fact, Mr Moller said,' his old tutor, a celebrated personality and legal author, had incorporated in his latest book on torts ppints suggested in discussion with students.

The English system, Mr Moller thought, helped to give Englishmen a tolerance and breadth of vision, whereas the cramming system as his generation had experienced it in New Zealand, in fact wherever it was practised, produced a narrow parochial outlook. There had not been in New Zealand enough encouragement for the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. One direction in which the effects of this were reflected was in the breakdown of family relations. A boy, for instance, had been told that his job in life would be such and such—and all his thoughts would be fixed on that aim; his education would not take him beyond the immediate necessities of earning his living. His father’s outlook similarly would be bounded by the need of providing for his family. The art of conversation in the home circle was often lost, and would probably be totally lost between parent and child, because the interests of both were limited to so few subjects. They had nothing to say to each other for more than a-quarter of an hour or so. Thus parents and children went their separate ways to find amusement outside the home. Yesterday was the club’s annual son and daughter day, and the guests included a large number of sons and daughters of Rotarians.