EDUCATION METHODS

Waipa Post, Volume 43, Issue 3392, 24 December 1931, Page 4

EDUCATION METHODS

PRQFICIENCY EXAMINATIONS,

Those who are apt to regard the New Zealand education system as among the best in the world must have received rather a shock to their complacency when they read what Miss E. R. Edwards, principal of the Waikato Diocesan Girls' School had to say about it. Speaking from what she described as " six years of concentrated experience of English secondary and university education," Miss Edwards declared that in these departments we are far behind the Old Country. "Do not imagine," she said, " that our poor little proficiency would meet with any recognition outside New Zealand." This criticism of a system which costs proportionately as much, if not more than any other country's, is sweeping and drastic. Our educationists have a habit of saying that the returns from education cannot be measured. If the system is good, its results, they say, must be taken for granted. That does not follow. They can be measured, if by no other process than by the comparison of standards which Miss Edwards herself has adopted. The question New Zealand taxpayers are now asking is whether in making education too free as a social service, and too easy in teaching practice, we have not lowered our standards of efficiency.—Dominion.