BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1948 TEACHING AT HOME

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 12, Issue 20, 10 February 1948, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Tuesdays and Fridays. TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1948 TEACHING AT HOME

School has started. In a normal year, that short sentence would have meant sighs of relief from most mothers and sighs of nostalgia from pupils still steeped in holiday joys. It would have meant a trooping back into schools where masters and mistresses would have faced the task of drilling holiday slackness out of their charges and getting them back into the harness of routine work.

This year, mother wears a super-worried look, Dad clears off to work with that “Thank-heaven-it’s-not-my-pigeon” expression, and the children think it’s a bit of a joke. There is, in all seriousness, a psychological angle to this school-at-home scheme that is going to be anything but simple. % What children will miss more, than anything else will be personal contact with their teachers and the discipline of the schoolroom. For it is a fact that the younger children, at any rate, can hardly be expected to have developed sufficient sense of responsibility or sufficient appreciation of the value of education to keep their noses to the grindstone without a certain amount of specialised supervision. And it is equally a fact that mothers of large families have not the time to give that supervision, even if they had the specialised training. School has started. But the hardest part of a parent’s job is going to be to make children realise it. However, realise it they must, for the alternative of re-opening the schools while there is still danger of infantile paralysis is unthinkable. Lessons in the home provide the only means whereby the children’s education can be carried on and everyone, from the Education Department down to the dunce of Primer 1 knows the system is not ideal. But it must be made to work.

That can only be done by the fullest co-operation of parents and children with the local teachers, who, far from having an extended holiday, are facing the hardest job they have been called upon to do for many a day.

In an effort to facilitate cooperation between teachers and parents, this paper has offered the District High School a' column once a week for supplementary lessons and any tips the headmaster or his teachers think it necessary to give parents or children in connection with actual assignments. First of the series of supplementary work, for forms 1 and 2, appears on page 6 of this issue. The feature will be continued while the need for it lasts.' In addition, realising the importance of this matter in every home the Beacon has made available space on its main news pages for announcements of importance to the school. While doing its best to help, however, this paper shares the wish of every parent that the necessity for this makeshift schooling will soon have passed.