EDUCATION

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 11, Issue 36, 4 June 1947, Page 6

EDUCATION

WIDENING SCOPE FUTURE NEEDS OUTLINED “We cannot reverse historic processes. For good or ill we have decided in New Zealand to widen the scope of education to cater for all our children and not just the most gifted ones,” said the senior lecturer in education at Otago University, Mr G. W. Parkyn, addressing members of young farmers’ clubs in Dunedin. “We have come a long way from the education system which prpvide a few years of artificial schooling. It is now gradually becoming a full life process,” he added. Mr Parkyn gave a brief review of the changes in the education system over the past century and elaborated some of the modern trends in schooling today. There had been a gradual breaking down of the examinational barriers in primary schools since the beginning of the century, and that change had now spread to the secondary schools, he said. The object was to have a common core of subjects for all pupils and, outside that, to have a wide range of optional subjects in which individual pupils could specialise. One of the causes of early setbacks in the attempt to alter educational processes had been the atti-

jp tude of the teachers themselves, said Mr Parkyn. “Every teacher has a vested interest in what he has learned, and the attempt to push everyone through the Greek-Latin mill led to a good deal of heart-burn-ing.” The present-day trend was to believe that the child had a better idea of what he needed to learn than the teacher. Once this country had settled the comparatively minor problems which confronted it there was a great task to be done overseas, added the speaker, who stated that 60 per cent, of the people of the world could not read. “We have to teach 1,000,000,000 people to read, and when that has been done, keep the current of information flowing to them,” concluded Mr Parkyn.