STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM

Taranaki Daily News, 19 December 1933, Page 7

STATE SCHOOL SYSTEM

STRONG DUNEDIN CRITICISM.

“UNCHECKED AND UNBALANCED.”

Dimedin, Dec. 15.

Allying himself with Professor Condliffe in the view that State education in New Zealand is spoilt by an unchecked and unbalanced system which has cost the Dominion half a century’s cultural progress and provided a happy hunting ground for political, economic and religious quacks, Archdeacon Whitehead, warden of Selwyn College, launched a vigorous attack on State schools during the course of his address at the break-up ceremony at St. Hilda’s Collegiate School. “Speaking, he said, as one whose trade was that' of a schoolmaster who had taught all classes from the lowest of primers to the highest secondary forms, he found little to admire in State education in New Zealand. A system of education was a useful and necessary institution but it could also be very dangerous, especially in a country like New Zealand where the only rival of the State school was the moving picture.

The primary schools provided by the Government in this country, he. considered, suffered from several grievous defects. One was their deadly uniformity, another their rigidity and a third the bureaucratic influence under which they laboured. They were bad faults and could be easily explained by reference to the system of grading teachers, the influence of training colleges, uniform text books and the system of school inspectors; and finally there was another great consideration which was comprised in the fact that too often the Minister of Education was an uneducated man. He had in the past been outspoken on the subject of inspectors and training colleges and had since had no cause to revise his views. Notwithstanding that a Dunedin editor had suggested that he was being facetious when he urged the abolition of inspectors, he was still convinced that they were a menace to the system and, although he had been delighted to see two of the training colleges in the Dominion closed up, he would not be satisfied until they were all done away with. They were of no use either to the students who were trained there or the children who were later' trained by the students. “What does a child at the primary school want in the way of education and instruction?” asked Archdeacon Whitehead. At 13 or 14 years of age most of them had decided that they did not want to learn any more. They thought they knew everything there was to know. That was the fault of a system which did not encourage the urge to learn. The love of knowledge for its own sake, if it were to flourish, needed a far more leisurely and' cultural system of education than that which existed to-day.

He thought that one of the great functions of the private schools of the country was to present a fittingly striking contrast to that system. The more there were of them, the better. Education was not the teaching of shapes of letters or tricks of arithmetic. Too often arithmetic was turned into roguery and literature into lust. Real education was perfect exercise of a kingly continence of body and souk