BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1950 EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 16, Issue 28, 4 December 1950, Page 4

BAY OF PLENTY BEACON Published Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. MONDAY, DECEMBER 4, 1950 EDUCATION IN AGRICULTURE

It is more than pleasing that, so early in its career as a separate secondary school,. Whakatane High School is giving attention to the development of an agricultural course. The appointment of a suitably-qualified master is the first step. Details of the course are not known as policy can hardly be decided until the teacher takes up his duties but, whatever form the course may take, it will be for the benefit of the district.

Essentially this is a farming community and its high school, as the centre which shapes its youth for careers, needs such a course as a dominating part of its curriculum.

The limited part given to farming instruction in New Zealand’s secondary schools generally is astounding. Only in the last 20 years or so has it become realised that the basis of farming can best be taught away from the farms. Agricultural colleges attached to the univerjities have tended to produce teachers and departmental instructors rather than farmers. There are, virtually, only two secondary schools making a specialty of their agricultural courses—Feilding Agricultural High School in the North Island and Rangiora High School in the South. Technical colleges and high schools have only scraped the surface otherwise.

In the most intensely farmed part of New Zealand, the northern part of this island, there is no school giving really adequate attention to farm instruction. Agitation has been going on for some years for a South Auckland Agricultural High School. Whatever may happen in that respect, there are few schools so ideally placed as is Whakatane High for development of courses related to the life of the community—farming and the domestic arts particularly. And that is the basis of education —the fitting of youth for useful life in the community. A wic 2 general course is the first essential and after that come the specialised courses.

Whakatane has a choice of two policies and either will result in benefit to this district. The school may institute and retain an elementary course which will give basic help only to those boys who, intending to farm later, are receiving their general schooling, or it may, from this elementary course, develop over a matter of years a course of a much more ambitious nature which will produce fully qualified scientific farmers. In developing such *a course, Whakatane High School would be hampered by lack of land. Probably it will never become a Feilding but it could, in time become a Rangiora. In the latter centre, 200 acres of farm was acquired over a long period.