SCHOOL EQUIPMENT

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLI, Issue 20446, 17 June 1936, Page 14

SCHOOL EQUIPMENT

CRITICISM BY LEADING TEACHER The secretary of the New Zealand Educational Institute submits the following report for publication: As an educationist he had failed, said Mr F. L. Combs, M.A., president of the New Zealand Educational Institute, speaking at Miramar South School last Tuesevening at a farewell function in his honour. This was not only because the work of a teacher was difficult—perhaps the most difficult kind of professional work that could be attempted —but because of inadequate means and unsatisfactory conditions in the schools. A miner would say that he had failed if, through lack of equipment, he had left most of the gold in the ore. This was exactly the position of the working teacher. For want of; things—all simple, all inexpensive, yet all essential things—he had to deny the child two-thirds of its possibilities of mental and cultural development. He had to see its promise stunted and its gifts thwarted. With an education admittedly too bookish, the child’s mind was starved for want of books sufficient in quantity and adequate in quality. The child’s need of activity was baulked in hundreds of classrooms for want of floor space. In an office the other day he had been told that when working at maximum capacity it held seven people. Had it been a school classroom it would have been expected to accommodate 35 children. Yet the child had a need of freedom to move about fourfold as great as that of the adult. “Sit Still and Say Nothing” Activity, not moralising, was the basis of character formation in children. To do things, not to listen to words, was the need of children if they were to build up self-reliance, independence and a willingness to face life’s tasks and duties. Yet “sit still and say nothing” was and has to be the motto in scores of congested classrooms, in some of which there is barely space to move between the desks. The other simple essential of real education was—in the case of children —plenty of human attention. The small class was therefore the key reform. This view was endorsed by the foremost man and the foremost woman in English educational circles to-day— Sir Percy Nunn and Dr. Susan Isaacs. Miss Isaacs, who would probably be visiting New Zealand soon, wrote: “But how different would most of our classrooms be if we understood that! What we have done, and are still so often doing to-day, is to shut the school door on conversation—and yet, strangely enough, to look for ease and fluency in the written word. We insist on a dumb tongue, but hope for an eloquent pen. This is attempting to stride over one of the essential steps in the child’s experience, and we deserve all the poverty of thought and expression which in fact we have got. “In the fourth place, it is the children’s need for real activity that offers the chief justification for smaller classes, for modern individual methods, and for an organisation and grouping

based upon the psychological study of individual differences. So long as we rely upon the lecture method as our main device in teaching, we can group masses of children of disparate gifts together—and hardly find out how much we are wasting their time. But as soon as we realise that it is what the children do and say that educates them, and try to provide for activity, we are brought up against the differences between one child and another.” In the face of the sort of schools and classrooms and classes that were common all over New Zealand it seemed to him to be only the obtuseness of cus-tom-bound minds that could cause talk of the excessively high cost of primary education. On providing floor space alone the average home spent something like twenty or thirty times as much per child as was spent in the schools. Basis of True Progress Who would call it a lavish boarding house table at which guests were grudged, bread and butter? Who that made contact with the schools and made the obvious inferences from obvious facts would deny that our children were being stinted of the bread and butter of real education? The present juncture with its changes of political and social outlook made one more optimistic in regard to the educational future. Not only in a democracy but in any kind of community there was only one solid basis of true progress. That basis was public opinion. Unless the public of New Zealand, or at least a considerable section of it, could be induced to become edu-cation-minded he (the speaker) was doubtful of the future of the schools with which was bound up all that was most important in the future of the community. He would repeat in conclusion that all that education reform demanded was simple essential things—plenty of room, plenty of human attention, plenty of books to feed thought, feeling and imagination—plenty of activity, of occupations, of that making of things that moulded their childish character. It was a sobering thought —perhaps a depressing thought—that what nature had given bountifully and without charge for thousands of generations our schools far too often and too much tended to take away from young human beings.