LAVISH SCHOOL EQUIPMENT

Press, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22514, 23 September 1938, Page 18

LAVISH SCHOOL EQUIPMENT

EDUCATION AIDS IN STOCKHOLM VIEWS OF TOURING HEADMASTER

The lavishness of equipment in intermediate schools in the Scandinavian countries was well illustrated in a letter read at the close, yesterday morning, of the annual conference of the Dominion Federation of School Committees’ Associations. The letter, sent from Warsaw, was written by Mr J. S. Wells, headmaster of the Kowhai School, Auckland, who is on a Carnegie Fellowship tour. The letter was written to Mr A. A. Buckley, a deleg: .e to the conference. Describing in detail the equipment at a typical Scandinavian intermediate school, Mr Wells’s letter listed such aids to school work ..as a huge assembly hall, separate and splendid gymnasiums for boys and girls, physics class-rooms and laboratories, biology rooms, sewing-rooms with electric and treadle machines, and much other specialised equipment. Such things as hot hot and cold water, radios, and telephones wore taken as a matter of course.

In Helsingfors, the letter said, Mr Wells had met the Rektor, D. Zilliacus, president of the New Education Fellowship, who came to the Dominion last year. Dr. Zilliacus had expressed the view that perhaps too much attention was given in the Scandinavian countries to school equipment. “Fancy New Zealand arriving at such a happy state of affairs,” added the letter. Dr. Zilliacus, although ho considered the time ripe for reorganising New Zealand’s educational system, nevertheless had high praise for the results of the Dominion system—judged from the types of people he had met while in this country.