FAITH IN EDUCATION

Taranaki Daily News, 16 January 1935, Page 9

FAITH IN EDUCATION

UNITED STATES ATTITUDE INTERESTING OBSERVATIONS. LESSONS DOMINION MAY LEARN. MR. D. M. RAE CONTINUES TALKS. Interesting anecdotes of his experiences during a visit to Canada and the United States were recounted by Mr. D. M. Rae, principal of the Auckland Training College, continuing his lecture series at the teachers’ summer school at New Plymouth yesterday. At New York,- he said, he had been greatly impressed by the endeavour made to deal with the tremendous problem of unemployment—not so much the economic aspect of the problem as the social aspect created by the wastage of youth. America was a country which placed an immense faith in education, and a remarkable experiment was being made by the work of a guidance bureau for unemployed at New York, which undertook to teach the workless the most profitable use of their enforced leisure. No concrete promise of employment was held out to them, although their training might tend to make them employable, but it at least held out the hope of saving their souls. “In New Zealand,” said Mr. Rae, “we give the unemployed money for sustenance. In America they are giving them both sustenance and the opportunity of improving their minds and their souls.” He related how, under the guidance of an unemployed silversmith, he saw a class of boys making brooches, including very beautiful work, that they had designed themselves. Although poverty seemed hard upon their heels there was evidence that they were at least spiritually content with the privilege of occupation. It was a privilege which New Zealand might do well to confer on those who had been unfortunate enough to lose their work through economic depression, or upon those who had never had work. Mr. Rae also made interesting comparison between the English and American university systems as he observed them, remarking particularly upon the American tendency to isolate faculties in separate colleges and upon the determination of the educational authorities to specialise highly the phases of each subject. It was not uncommon, he said, to see 10 or 12 professors engaged in an education college, whereas one man usually covered the entire scope of the work under the British system. Even if there were in instances a tendency to overdo specialisation in America, the system was, on the whole, superior. Staff cooperation in American universities was excellent. RESEARCH WORK APPLIED. Another fact which forcibly struck him was the practical application of research work in agricultural problems done in the college laboratories. Farmers noticeably were keenly interested in and appreciative of the work done. In New Zealand there was far too great a tendency to distrust and criticise the work done by such departments. In Canada Mr. Rae sai<i he noticed a marked tendency to make the school a centre of social life and to regard it as community property to be used for the benefit of the community, adults as well as children. In Canada, United Stages and England, people did not hang up signs that no one was wanted at the school after three or four o’clock. “In America,” said Mr. Rae, “they say ‘Come in.’ In New Zealand, we say, ‘Get out.’ That is just the difference.” The physical education system m America disappointed him. In Canada and U.S.A, there was not the same conception of the playground as existed in New Zealand. In the cities the playground at the schools were frequently deplorably small and there was no definite scheme of physical and recreative education such as existed in New Zealand. In addition to relating his observations on social problems Mr. Rae gave a vivid and entertaining account of his journey across the continent, graphically describing the magnificence of the Rocky Mountains and the great gorge of the Fraser River where the salmon fought their way up interminable series of rapids at spawning time, sometimes so thick that the water was black with their moving bodies. The prairies of Canada impressed him as wastes of dreariness and loneliness — a country of crude unpainted houses but elaborate barns, inhabited largely by mid-European people who had come to “mind the wheat.” They lived in utter loneliness through a winter of six and seven months when the temperature at times dropped as low as 40 and 50 degrees below zero. The great centre of the prairie country, Winnipeg, was a city built upon foundations of wheat, none too firm a foundation at present.