Education.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20104, 6 December 1930, Page 16

Education.

We believe that the Education Supplement issued with The Press to-day will be of use to parents whose children are about to enter post-primary schools or are leaving them, and of interest, at least, to many other readers. The variety of the special articles contributed by Dr. Hight, Dr. Hansen, Mr Thomas, Mr Strachan, and Mr Parr is sufficiently wide to embrace most of the educational field open to boys and girls from about their twelfth year on, and this variety is the value of them taken together. It is unnecessary to add to it here, though to do so would be pleasant; but we may draw attention to their unity, in one respect. It is the more remarkable, since they were of course written independently. Mr Thomas, writing about the secondary school in an " intermediate town," finds the good description, " everybody's school," for it, and rejoices in its individual character. Mr Strachan describes the rural school, which he wishes to be staffed by teachers specially alive to " the advantages of a spacious euviron"ment" in teaching, and in which ho wishes education to be more directly related to Nature and inspired by it than is possible in urban schools. Dr. Hansen, though his object is to explain and recommend the work of Technical High Schools, no more argues that they should displace schools of other types than he submits to the possibility of their being themselves displaced. Mr Parr's article is a vigorous defence of the private schools as an " escape " from the uniformity of a system." They all protest against standardisation, (hough from different points of view and against different aspects of standardisation; but their general agreement is impressive. It shows again, what cannot be shown too often or plainly, where one of the chief educational dangers lies in the Dominion, and it is a danger now not less real but more real than ever. That the nationalising of the system has produced excellent results nobody will deny. The danger is that nationalising tends to become departmentalising; and the effect of departmentalising education is to mechanise and stereotype it, and to dull in this way even wise reforms.