To Probe Education.

Thames Star, Volume LXV, Issue 19345, 28 February 1935, Page 4

To Probe Education.

NEW RESEARCH COUNCIL outline op activities. 'STOCKTAKING LONG OVERDUE." Au outline of the aspirations oi the newly-founded Council for Educational .Research in New Zealand is given in the first of a series of pamphlets which the council is publishing. The scheme has been made possible through a grant oi 87,500 dollars by the Carnegie Corporation to be made available in five yearly amounts of 17,500 dollars.

"In beginning its active operation, the council considers it very desirable that the people of New Zealand should know what it is attempting to do and the general methods for attaining its purpose," the pamphlet states. "This is an experiment made in the interests of the children and youth of New Zealand, and the future welfare of the country. The council hopes that as the experiment proceeds it will attract financial aid from local sources, and that, on its completion, the results will convince the people of New Zealand that research should be a permanent feature of any system of education worthy of the name. In each of the four centres an Institute for Educational Research is being established. Preliminary meetings have been held and all four institutes should be active by the beginning of March, 1935. The best work will probably be done where small 'cells' of Avorkers within the local institutes or within outside bodies make themselves responsible for groups of associated problems. A section of an institute* or of a teachers' organisation might, for example, undertake the study of examinations, or the school entrance age, or the transition from primary to secondary school. Any of these subjects would split into a dozen minor problems to be undertaken by individuals. As soon as possible, the council will begin ir each section of the plan a key research around which smaller piece? of work will naturally crystallise.

Where Real Danger Lies

"No apology is made for the almost complete neglect of questions of teaching methods in the plan of research," the pamphlet proceeds. "The experienced teacher would probably be the last to demand it. The black doubt that lurks in the bottom of every honest pedagogue's heap is not so much whether ho is teaching correctly as whether what he is teaching is worth teaching at. all. The real danger is not thai, we shall teach the right thing inefficiently, but that we shall teach the wrong things more and more efficiently.. Numberless researches into teaching methods, moreover, are being prosecuted abroad, and nothing is to be gained by duplicating them in less favourable circumstances in New Zealand. The council hopes to make the results of these investigations available in New Zealand while reserving its resources for problems which are peculiarly our own.

"What New Zealand needs above all else is a national philosophy of education. Because of its size and isolation this council has a set of educational problems which are peculiar to it, and the solution of which cannot be found in British and American text-books, but only in a firsthand study of local conditions. Wo have, admittedly, a few educational inventions, good or bad, to oui credit, but, on the Avhole, we have imported ideas and institutions ready-made from abroad, and have applied them blindly to our existing system. The time for stocktaking is long overdue, but it has been nobody's special business to do it.

"The council's chief task, therefore, is a survey of the organisation and administration of the New Zealand education system with a view to discovering, first of all, the degree of co-ordination between its parts, and, secondly, the extent to which it is sensitive to the rapidlychanging needs of the community. For mere internal self-consistency means nothing in an education system which is divorced from the realities of a wider civic life."