EDUCATION.

West Coast Times, 14 June 1912, Page 1

EDUCATION.

COMMISSION AT AUCKLAND,

mSS BUTLER’S EVIDENCE,

NO CO-EDUCATION OF SEXES

AUCKLAND, June 9. The Royal Commission on Education continued its sittings yesterday. Miss Blanche Butler, headmistress of the Auckland Girls’ Grammar School, said that there was a great need for the correlation of primary and secondary education. She thought that teachers in each province should meet and discuss methods, so as to get some uniformity. She considered that it was a mistake that girls should be taught by male teachers. In addition to the fact that a man lacked a certain complete understanding of a girl’s nature, chivalry gave her an advantage of which she was not slow to avail herself. Boys and girls in primary schools should be separated as they were in secondary schools, and girls taught only by women. VALUE OF SCHOOL GARDENS-

NIL. Mr, J. W. Tibbs, Headmaster of the Auckland Boy’s Grammar School, suggested a system of a main secondary school with subsidiary shhoolsi,. The latter should receive junior free-placo pupils, and the main school should receive the seniors. As the population increased, subsidiary schools could become main schools. Education Boards should bo relieved of the supervision of technical education , and on the board to attend to this matter experts should have a place. Touching on agricultural instruction the witness as an old gardener said that he had no faith in book-taught cultivation. His idea of school gardens v, as that they wore a pleasant' hobby for those who could not take part in school games. Their value to the agricultural community was nil, and the ground would bo much better taken up by fives courts, etc. If the Government had a desire to benefit agriculture and horticulture in rural districts, hto best way to it would bo to subsidise the societies which arranged exhibitions in those branches. Mr. Tibbs thought that it was possible that nature study could bo undertaken at too early an age. WHY NO HOME WORK NOW P Dealing with the question of primary education in its relation to secondary education, and where it failed, lie said that he found that, in very few primary schools, was there any home - work. The boy who did home-work improved more rapidly than the boy who did not. It was a pity that it had been dropped, and were there a recurrence to it, he was suro that there would he a marked advance in the standard of boys’ education, and' a more general interest taken in that education by tho boy’s parents. Sorao headmasters had said that classes were so big that it would bo impossible to supervise all tho homework, but there was a number of subjects, poetry, etc., which could bo most advantageously studiedo at homo. Home, work would exercise a salutary moral influence on the boy’s life. Boys would not run about the streets, and it would also enable the greatest amount of possible good to be obtained from our very liberal system of education. Manual and technical,training should, from his point of view, ho loft to continuation classes.

I • seemed to him that there was too much running about ”in connection with primary education. To have hobbies like swimming gardening, and woodwork, during school hours, would tend to make a boy unsettled.