N.Z. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE

Waikato Times, Volume 92, Issue 14254, 3 January 1920, Page 6

N.Z. EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE

ANNUAL CONFERENCE. PRESIDENT’S OPENING ADDRESS. NATIONAL IDEALS. 1 , Telegraph.-—-Press Association.) WELLINGTON, Friday. The annual conference of the New Zealand Educational Institute opened to-day. Tho president, Mr C. R. Munro (Auckland), in his opening address, emphasised that the school ought to be essentially a moral institution and its chief end and aim to instil noble ideals in life and duly as well as express itself in conduct of the highest typo. A writer on education in recent years laid stress upon the importance of the recognition of the social aspects of education. They desired to get away from the ideal of efficiency r.f the individual and to see instead the training of the individual for the general good of society. The last was not wholly for the school or the home, for the church, tho vocation, the press and society itself each must take ;is : share. The school aimed at training pupils to efliiciency in every sense, physically, intellectually and morally, and he believed the school could attain such a high ideal superior to German and Prussian educational systems. The president said: “The result we have seen. The whole German nation was animated by one ambition —lust for world power. Had the leaders of that nation devoted the same amount of effort and organisation to the incalculation of a really worthy social ideal, there is no place among the civilised nations to which their country might not -have aspired and attained.” He went on to say that Germany had featured as -her ideal in schools and universities and in her whole social structure, war and a German nation resting on war. The public schools could be used, and had been used, to mould -a nation as their leaders desired, and they could be used again in The future with a worthy ideal, not of glorification of the individual or of the nation, but the ideal of social service. There were three ways, he considered, by which the social ideal could be achieved: By the corporate life of the school through the methods it employed and through its studies and curriculum. The corporate life of the school had been in a great measure neglected in the past. He believed one of the great weaknesses in New Zea■land schools was over government by teachers. The fault was not the fault of the teacher, but of the system which placed from 60 to 220 children under the care of a teacher, and virtually made him a drill sergeant. There could be rio real education, no development of the individual under such conditions. The problem of the largo class method, the conception of what was a possibility in educational methods and our conception of education should be one that would include all the classes of values, the attainment of which made better men and women.