EDUCATION

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XVII, 9 December 1927, Page 8

EDUCATION

VALUE OF CITIZENSHIP ADDRESS BY AMERICAN PROFESSOR. Amherst, Mass. "Development of profound scholarship is secondary to education for citizenship. The safety of any democracy rests upon the degree of education for citizenship which its people possess.” This was pointed to as the ideal for American colleges by Roscoe W. Thatcher, president of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, during his inaugural address as the tenth president of the institution, delivered before the assembled representatives of more than 70 eastern schools and colleges. “Unfortunately there still persists in the minds of many persons the idea that the purpose of ‘vocational education’ is to impart handicraft skill in the practice of some vocation. As applied to agriculture this is said to mean that the purpose of an agricultural college curriculum should be to teach students ‘how to farm,’ and that if its graduates do not go immediately into the practice of farming their education must be at fault,” President Thatcher declared. ‘‘To me this trade school conception of vocational education is wholly erroneous as applied to these institutions which are established to provide ‘liberal and practical education in the several pursuits and professions of life.’ The time and practice required to give even a modicum of handicraft skill . . . would mean such a narrow specialisation of effort as to defeat that ‘liberal’ education which is our goal. "From my standpoint vocational educations differs from ordinary academic, scientific or so-called ‘cultural’ education not in standards or quality or thoroughness of development of those attributes of soul, mind and body which characterise the educated person; but only in the method and material used in imparting these desirable characteristics and in the enhancing and dignifying of the circumstances and surroundings of life in a given vocation. “Our first hope, therefore, is to dignify and ennoble as pursits in life those vocations from which our students come or to which they expect to go, and so to aid in establishing that contented and prosperous rural and industrial citizenship which is the bulwark of safety to our democracy.”