PARENTS AND EDUCATION.

Waikato Times, Volume 114, Issue 19100, 10 November 1933, Page 6

PARENTS AND EDUCATION.

It is generally agreed that there was never a time when the best education yet conceived was more needed by every individual. A changing world bristling with economic, industrial and social crises calls for continual and exceedingly intelligent adjustments. Almost anyone knows that all the solutions will not be completed by the adults of to-day.

In the face of a wide cutting down of teaching staffs, materials for work, length of school terms, and subjects that have enriched the school curriculum in an effort to link it to the interests of a modem world, comes the challenge to achieve greater things in educating boys and girls than have ever yet been thought of. The schools, thus handicapped, cannot be expected to do it alone. It is a case of parents to the rescue.

Events of the last two years have indicated that the nation needs to renew its loyalty to the importance of education, comments the Christian Science Monitor. Obviously it cannot do this without a better concept of education than the one so widely deserted in hard times. Parents have unprecedented opportunities this year to enter upon more serious study and testing of the needs and effective means of meeting them. Under their guidance, aided by the teachers, boys and girls have every right to win satisfactory answers to their questions concerning the worth of what they are getting for their parents’ tax money.

Yet while the schools are in the laboratory, so to speak, to emerge, it is hoped, a better understood and a finer means of teaching boys and girls to live well, an emergency situation 1 exists which must be recognised and met. In many localities the schooling offered this year is far below even recent concepts of excellence and adequacy. What can parents do to mak§ it up to their children?

What can be done so to enrich home relationships that boys and girls may gain in the home the practice they will otherwise miss in working with people for a joint cause? It is for the parents to see to it that the children have every opportunity to enrich their points of view with broader interests—by the developing of hobbies, crafts, the visiting of museums, exhibits, industrial plants, and by helping them to take part in worth while discussion.