Education Continuous Process

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31114, 18 July 1966, Page 1

Education Continuous Process

It was important that education should be looked on, not as a terminal subject but as a continuous process—,a totality stretching from the cradle to the grave, Mr A. S. M. Hely, secretary of the National Council of Adult Education, said in a panel discussion on Saturday night.

The panel, which consisted of Mr G. M. Troup, former liaison officer for Canterbury University (chairman), Mr Hely, Mr J. F. Williams, a teacher at Shirley Intermediate School, and Mr G. M. Miller, lecturer in economics at Canterbury University, was discussing the future of adult education in New Zealand. Mr Hely said that education should not be looked on as it had in the past, as a process of giving children a

store of knowledge which would help them through life. It should be looked on as part of life and growth itself. Without continuous education life would end some years before the grave. Education, as a life-long process, must be seen and planned as such. “Apart from a few young people who are completing higher learning at universities and training colleges almost all those who will play an important part in the community in 25 years have already completed their primary and secondary education and have left school. “Are they properly equipped for their jobs? The answer must be no,” Mr Hely said. These young people were not equipped to take tip the responsibilities which would face them in their maturity and few of them had the desire for adult education. It was those who had left school very early who needed adult education the most but they did not use the opportunity. “The onward march of

science and technology has created forces in our society which make the proper education of our young people essential.”

In the past, adult education in New Zealand had been treated rather as a fringe area of formal education and as a way of using leisure. This attitude was changing. “In the future the pressures will become greater, and in meeting these pressures lies the future of adult education,” Mr Hely said. . Replying to a question from the floor about how it was possible to get people to attend adult education classes, Mr Troup said that we were making formal education far too much a matter of knowledge and skills rather than of attitudes. This was the main reason why children became tired of education after their first few years at school. Mr Miller said that no one had the answer to the education of teen-agers. If people had a sense of involvement then the educational process could continue on that basis. A high proportion of young adolescents had no interest in

the educational process, and this was proved by the exodus of children aged 15 from school.

The wastage rate in terms of useless activity must be very high and the recent outcry against school certificate might be a belated recognition of this, he said. Speaking on the special contributions adult education had to make to the present educational needs of the community, Mr Hely said that even the universities were becoming increasingly narrow and specialised in the education they gave. They could no longer turn out well-rounded people and this process must be the problem of adult education. Mr Williams said that most parents got used to helping their children with homework while their children were at primary school. But when the children got to secondary school their parents found that they no longer had the knowledge to assist their children. They no longer understood what their children were being taught. Adult education could help in this way.