The Sun FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1928. A WELTER OF REFORMS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 351, 11 May 1928, Page 8

The Sun FRIDAY, MAY 11, 1928. A WELTER OF REFORMS

AMAZE of experimental reforms lias been fashioned by the Schools Syllabus Revision Committee. It took the patient company of experts rather more than two years to devise the thing. In all probability, it will take at least two generations of politicians to get through it with clear heads and without loss of temper. And long before that far-off time commission after commission of experts will have trod laboriously the treadmill of educational reform.

There is no cause for surprise or exasperation. It has become almost a universal rule that when expert educationists have been given a generous opportunity to remould any education system to their hearts’ desire, they merely succeed in producing a mass of clever confusion. Such, in many features, is the product of the Dominion’s latest combination of reconstructive educational talent and exhaustive research. The committee simply has overwhelmed itself and marred its work, so full of excellent intention, with a multiplicity of elaborate notions. It is not necessary for laymen to criticise unkindly the committee’s scheme of primary school education reform. Several of its own members, in a minority report, are inclined to poke a little intellectual fun at the majority. They say plainly that “the committee generally sought after a grandiose and embroidered system of work, involving disruption in the existing organisation, whereas the real task was to evolve a practical scheme to secure better articulation, without additional expenditure.” Precisely ! But was it necessary to spend two years on seeking something that was plain to everybody except, apparently, the majority of expert educationists on the committee ? As a plain citizen has phrased it, “the committee’s report aims at Pordising the existing system of primary school education—mass production of children, all true to an embroidered model and ready, when they can he crammed no more, to run briskly to easy occupations.” Perhaps that criticism is somewhat harsh, but it holds a kernel of truth. It has to he said in unqualified commendation of the committee’s painstaking work that there was no difference of opinion about its main discovery, this being the obvious fact that the present system of primary education is in need of what the minority members describe as “a drastic and sweeping overhaul.” Unfortunately, too many sweepers have spoilt the prospect of a drastic revision on economical lines.

All that is good in the voluminous report (and there are many excellent recommendations) has been impaired by a welter of “grandiose and embroidered” methods and suggestions which, if adopted, would rocket the cost of education without any guarantee that the additional expenditure would solve the parental problem of what to do with their highly proficient children. The Minister of Education appears to be jubilant over the prospect of children ignoring Batin and other academic subjects in favour of practical subjects, but the gain will be doubtful if knowledge of handicrafts merely enables hoys and girls to appreciate the merits' of foreign manufactures.

It is to be hoped that the administrative authorities will split the committee’s elaborate structure into a hundred sections, and he content with building only on the best of them.