EDUCATION TO-DAY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 68, Issue 5940, 8 May 1944, Page 2

EDUCATION TO-DAY

CHILD’S INDIVIDUALITY MODERN DEVELOPMENT TRENDS When discussing education for creative service in his presidential address at Canterbury College, before members of the Christchurch branch of the New Education Fellowship, Mr A. G. Linn said that educational and psychological research had already conferred great benefits upon the modern child.

“It has been found that the child must be studied as a child,” said Mr Linn, “and should not be regarded as a little adult.” It was now realised that the child was “a living, developing, thinking, and feeling individual,” he added, and he believed that research had completely changed the school and made it a happier place. Teaching principles had been revolutionised, and he looked forward to even greater progress.

Not only was part of the child developed, said Mr Linn, but the whole personality was developed, physically, emotionally, mentally, as well as creatively. At the same time, a balance was maintained with regard to the unified whole of the juvenile. Recognition had also been made of the environmental influences of the school, the home, and the community upon the child.

Research had shown the wide individual differences in children in capacity as well as in degree. “Education must not only provide for the development of the child’s personality,*’ continued the speaker, “and must realise that each one is different. All children cannot be forced through the same mould. “I do not like to term ‘to educate’ a child or youth or an adult,” said Mr Linn. “Rather let us provide the opportunity for educating themselves. 1 believe that they will welcome opportunities for education in the widest sense and on lines in which they are already interested.” The whole aim in education, Mr Linn said, was to make the child not only a citizen of his own country, but a citizen of the world. Its trend, he believed, was democratic in the international sphere.