TEACHING IN RUSSIA

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 2, Issue 256, 21 June 1932, Page 8

TEACHING IN RUSSIA

A NEW ZEALANDER'S VIEWS. Mr. George Ashton, a Christchurch teacher now having a year's teaching experience in London, writes in an entertaining manner on some of his experiences in . Russia, which he visited during his three week's holiday at Easter. "Schools in Russia," he says, "are quite different places from those in New Zealand and England. The children bounce out of their seats and interrupt the teacher at any time. They all worlc in groups of about six or eight, and in no room is there ever silence. While we were talking to the head in one factory school a boy of about 14 came in without knocking and announced that as he was the president of the Camera Club, he pr-oposed taking our photographs. Next he arranged chairs, told us all where to sit, took the photograph with the manner of a professional, thanked us, and left. ' "If you want to know anything about the Five Year Plan, ask a Russian kid. He has a mine of information about it in his head, just as a New Zealand boy can tell you the position of the leading teams in football or cricket. "One of the greatest experiments the Russian schools have made, I think, is in the question of sex education. Boys and girls from 12 are given direct and straightforward knowledge in mixed classes and are taught everything by observing dissection of cats and. dogs. The teachers claim that with the boys and girls who have been brought up on these lines there is no fsex problem' at all."