The Timaru Herald. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1930. THE SCHOOL YEAR OPENS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXXV, Issue 18490, 4 February 1930, Page 8

The Timaru Herald. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1930. THE SCHOOL YEAR OPENS.

With high hopes a quarter of a million potential citizens of this fair country will find their way back to school this week. For many, long weeks of anxiety came to an end with the announcement of the results of the end-of-year examinations. The successful pupils go forward with warmer enthusiasm, while to hundreds whose scholastic hopes were not realised, the new year offers another opportunity to retrieve the failure of the past. Doubtless to many parents, the reopening of the school year, following so soon after the announcement of the examination results, confronts them with the problem of deciding the course to pursue in determining the educational future of their children. From end to end of New Zealand educationists have expressed their considered opinion on the oft-repeated question: “Are examinations worth while?” and it may be said that generally speaking the teaching profession has ranged itself in opposition to the existing system of examination. The interested general public, too, have asked themselves if examinations have any real value, particularly as indicators of character and business ability? Does the present system, many parents have asked, encourage mere “cramming,” or does it help all-round mental development? Lord Riddell, who speaks both as a business man and as one of the leading authorities on technical education answering the question : Do the results of school and university examinations afford any evidence of a capacity for business? put to him by the New Education Fellowship in England replied that it all depends what is meant by “capacity for business.” “If it means,” he says, “capacity to write grammatically, to make correct arithmetical calculations, and the understanding of languages—in short, if it means the capacity to perform the mechanism of business, the answer is in the affirmative. If it means the possession of energy, enterprise, good judgment, initiative, intuition—the vitals of success —the reply is in the negative. Many uneducated people have these attributes. They are inherited and due to early environment. Education cannot supply them. Indeed, education frequently seems to have a tendency to stunt them.” The most outspoken critics declare that purely academic education tends to words instead of action. It develops the power of describing things instead of doing them. Many successful business men have no power of expression, but they know what to do and how to do it. The tendency of purely academic education is to lead people to attach more importance to expression than to action. The business world ranges itself in sharp opposition to the attitude of the great majority of the teachers on the question of the value of examination. If they were asked, however, if they consider the present examination system is producing the type of person who is best suited to the needs of the Dominion, the business men would answer that while they consider the examination system should be retained as an indispensable adjunct to any form of education, what matters most is the course of instruction the pupil receives. Hitherto the educational authorities have paid insufficient attention to the educational requirements of the mass of the students. The rising generation cannot all hope to be lawyers, doctors, teachers, professors, scientists, and clergymen. Notwithstanding the stress laid on academic education, some men must make laws and some make furniture; some must dig for truth and some cultivate the soil; indeed, many must live in the country and many in the towns, if the Dominion is to make substantial progress. Lord Riddell contends that it is absurd to suggest that examinations can be dispensed with in medicine, law, accountancy, nursing, teaching, and the like. The examination system may have gone too far, but its critics are going to the other extreme. The abolition of examinations, would lead to general sloppiness, because when all is said there are only a few geniuses about who are able to get and use information in their own way. In New Zealand the educational authorities are showing a definite tendency to make a fetish of agricultural bias in education, but the stern fact confronts them in the realisation that they must face fundamentals; and it is a fundamental fallacy to imagine that the rising generation will look to agriculture as their life’s avocation unless the economic phase of the problem is more alluring. Indeed, many headmasters of district high schools find that parents who have served a lifelong apprenticeship on the land, are the first to demand that their children should go into other branches of life’s activities. The big problem facing our educational authorities is the fact as Dr. Nicholas M. Butler recently stated, that a definite change has taken place in the centre of gravity of human interest. The position has shifted from politics to economics; from

considerations that had to do with forms of government, with the establishment and protection of individual liberty, to considerations that have to do with the production, distribution, and consumption of wealth. The changing needs of the nation demands the production of a new. type of citizenship, and since the nation marches forward on the feet of little children, the schools of today must not ignore the vastly changed conditions that face the young people now emerging from our schools.

THE WAIMATE BY-ELECTION

No comment we can offer is needed to make more emphatic the verdict of the people of Waimate, as expressed in the polling in the by-election on Saturday, which resulted in overwhelming victory for Mr Hoskins. To realise the precise meaning of the triumphal victory of the Independent candidate, and the decisive defeat of the candidate who declared himself an “out-and-out supporter of the Mayor," the townspeople of Waimate and the public generally throughout South Canterbury who are deeply Interested, have but to recall the circumstances which resulted in the retirement of Councillors Forbes Wallace and Macdonald, as a protest against the course of action pursued by the Mayor Waimate. We do not Intend, In face of Mr Hoskins's splendid victory, to discuss the shortcomings of the Mayor in his attitude towards the earnest and courageous members of the Council who opposed him, or his absurdly hostile attitude towards this journal since we challenged his right to pass judgment on the alleged breach of privilege committed by us, without giving Councillors an opportunity to voice their views. Suffice it to say, however, that the voice of the people of Waimate has spoken and the verdict is a handsome vindication of the courageous stand taken by the Councillors who refused to be browbeaten, and who in sheer desperation handed in their resignations in order to give the townspeople of Waimate an opportunity to pass judgment on the Mayoral policy. Obviously the vote of the people of Waimate is a vote for the democratic control of the affairs of a splendidly progressive centre. It is regrettable, of course, that the public services of residents of the calibre of Messrs Forbes Wallace and Macdonald have for the present been lost to the borough of Waimate, but the course they took was inevitable in view of the Mayor's tactics, and we have not the slightest hesitation in saying that the by-election on Saturday has cleared the municipal air, and the Mayor and Council now know what the people of Waimate think of the sorry business. It must be gratifying to the Councillors who refused to regard themselves as mere pawns on the municipal chessboard, to contemplate the verdict of the people. Doubtless the successful candidate will be warmly congratulated by his fellow townspeople. The defeat of Mr Joyce was Inevitable. Not because he Is Mr Joyce, but because he carried the banners of a lost cause, and for that reason he is entitled to sympathy in the position he occupied on the poll. The voice of the people has spoken, and the administration of the municipal affairs of Waimate should now run smoothly in obedience to the clearly-expressed mandate which the electors endorsed in such an emphatic fashion on Saturday last.