BETTER EDUCATION

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 59, Issue 4220, 6 December 1939, Page 4

BETTER EDUCATION

THE EXTRA YEAR AT SCHOOL. “During this extra year you will have the opportunity to plan out what you would like your life to be, and to begin the task of making it. If you use. it well, you will not later on allow any seeds that happen to te floating about, plant themselves in your mind and grow into healthy plants. You will realise that some of the tilings that force themselves upon your attention (in the newspaper, in the cinema, in your surroundings), are not what you require to build up the sort of man you want to be. You will cultivate the little plot of your own mind. You will plan out what you want to grow tliere and how. 11' you were to leave school now, you would not be able to do this as well as you will be able to in 12 months’ time. If you will deliberately set to work now, in this little community, to co-operate with your teacher in a process of self-education to fit yourself for life, you will gain something of incalculable value to you for the rest of your life, and you will be thankful that you had the opportunity of the extra year - at school instead of being pitchforked into working life 'before you understood what you could make of your life.”—Mr W. H. Robinson, vice-chairman of the Education Committee of the British National Union of Teachers, in “a talk to children about to enter the extra year at school.” *