PRACTICAL EDUCATION.

Taranaki Daily News, 9 February 1934, Page 6

PRACTICAL EDUCATION.

To-day children from a number of Taranaki schools purpose visiting Borthwick’s freezing works at Waitara to see pigs which were grown under a special pigraising competition graded on the hooks. Experts will explain the reasons for the particular classifications, and the carcases will subsequently be loaded on to an overseas steamer at the port of New Plymouth for shipment to London. This is a type of education for which there can be nothing but praise, and the promotor of the competition, Mr. W. M. Dill-Macky, and those associated with him during the two years the competition has been in existence are deserving of congratulation. The institution of the boys and girls’ clubs, with their allied activities such as the pig-rearing competitions, is the ideal kind of practical education for children destined to take up work on the land. Besides affording them knowledge that will be most useful to them in their life work it gives them a personal pride in their work at an early and most important stage in their lives, and in addition offers them the opportunity of seeing and thinking for themselves. The interest thus created and the knowledge gained should be an important factor in arresting what a few years ago was a growing evil—the drift of population from the country to the towns. The comprehensive nature of both theoretical and practical education to which the children of to-day are heir gives them advantages unknown to their fathers, and it will be surprising if tangible results do not become increasingly apparent in the years to come.