Changed U.S. View Of Education’s Purpose

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31098, 29 June 1966, Page 7

Changed U.S. View Of Education’s Purpose

Equipping a person for a job was no longer regarded in the United States as the basic purpose of education, said Mr A. L. Vadala, a secondary school teacher from Denver, Colorado, who arrived after a direct flight to Christchurch on Monday afternoon.

One of 11 teachers selected under an experimental extension of the American Field Scholar exchange scheme, Mr Vadala will be on the staff of Christchurch Boys High Schoo] for just over two months. American education was undergoing a rapid change, i he said. “This change has ;been needed for a long time. People are finally realising i that the education a child gets probably constitutes the most important factor in his later development.” Teaching individuals to form their own opinions, to adopt themselves to new situations —this was now considered the main purpose of education. “There has been a major change in the whole philosophy of education,” Mr Vadala said. The reason for it was the “frightening fact” that in 20 or 30 years threequarters of the American population would be engaged in jobs In which there was no contact with the product of their work—they would be pushing buttons, or operating tapes. This non-involvement in their work deprived people of aims or goals. Money became the only thing accomplished from their efforts, and money alone did not represent an accomplishment. People, in fact, lost the ability to become involved with their own environment and their own lives, and turned to television pro-

grammes—of “terrible” quality—so as to be involved with others’.

Education had to try to counter this danger, Mr Vadala said, by showing people how to use their inner resources. “If society is to produce people who can retain their sanity, it must find something which can fill their leisure time.”

At his co-educational public high school in Englewood, a suburb of Denver, Mr Vadala’s pupils are aged from 15 to 18. His subjects there are “Western civilisation” (its basis, as illustrated by periods in history studied in depth) and “cultural history”: '(essentially a study of a “specific period of philosophical writing, in conjunction with the cultural expressions of the period”). He did not know yet what subjects and classes he would be taking at Christchurch Boys’ High School. One of the advantages of the scheme was that such arrangements were left entirely to the teacher and the school concerned. Two of the American teachers taking part in the scheme arrived in Auckland on Monday, and the remaining eight have gone to schools in Malaysia, Costa Rica and Chile. All will submit reports to the field service headquarters in New York on their return.

Archaeological Activity.— More than 500 on-the-spot archaeological expeditions, made by Polish museums in the last five years, produced sufficient material to organise some 30 exhibitions in connexion with Poland’s millenium this year.—Warsaw.