Boys Leave Too Soon

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 850, 19 December 1929, Page 10

Boys Leave Too Soon

EDUCATION AIMS DEFEATED PROBLEMS which, face the boy training for a commercial or an agricultural career are clearly agitating educational authorities in different parts of New Zealand. The headmaster of King’s College, Auckland, the Rev. H. K. Archdall, believes the students leave school too soon, while the headmaster of Christ’s College, Christchurch, the Rev. E. C. Crosse, states frankly that no country can decide its future business leaders simply by giving education a particular twist.

The simultaneous statements of these college headmasters point clearly to the need for serious attention by parents and by the members of the business community as well. Mr. Archdall records with regret the fact that boys who take the commercial and agricultural courses do not remain for the full four-year secondary school course. Far too many leave at the end of the second year. In the case of boys intending to go on to the land, he urges parents to leave their sons at school for at least four years, because the period of school training is the only broadening influence they will receive before accepting the necessarily xaersisteht tasks of farming. “We want to send out into our country districts young men of intellectual culture and the power of moral and social leadership,” he .said in his report, presented to the breakup function yesterday, “for it is such men who will help to raise the general level of country life and help to stop the drift to the cities, which is,. I think, ass ~’ , "<Y dangerous proportions in Ne’ i. EMPLOYcu. ART In commercial pursidts, too, Mr. Archdall noted the hal it of parents to withdraw their sons from school when their education was but half completed. The reason for this, he said, was partly the failure of some parents to appreciate the value of education, as distinct from information. But there w T as also the undoubted fact that banks, insurance companies and commercial houses tended to ask for boys to enter their employ at too early an age before it was reasonable to say that either mind or character was adequately developed or stabilised. An organised attempt to meet the difficulties created by the Arbitration Court laws was required. These laws lay down a necessary wage to be paid at 21 years of age, he went on, and banks, insurance offices, and business houses seem to want to have boys for as many years as possible before they turn 21. I would venture to contend that (1) for the sake of educational advantage, the banks, offices, and business houses should be prepared to meet any extra expense involved in a longer term

at school for boys, or (2) the arbitration IifWIT should be altered, in so far as they conflict with educational progress; or, best of all (3), a frank recognition should be made of the advisability of starting young men with varying educational advantages at different ages, and training them in specialised ways for specialised tasks.

“This would mean that boys who underwent a longer period of organised education at school, and possibly at the university, would have the opportunity of offering their more highly trained services for posts of special importance. This system is working well in the Civil Service in Whitehall, iu England, and in India, and ought, I believe, to be instituted in New Zealand, for at present it is very rare in certain Government departments for university graduates to enter the service.

“I am confident of the general truth of the statement that the longer the organised education of a boy goes on at school, the further he will eventually he able to go both in intellectual grasp and power of control in the business world.” FOUNDATION NEEDED

Upon the subject of business training, Mr. Crosse expressed the belief at Christchurch that very little could be done to coax boys on to the land by actually teaching them agriculture. It was not the business of the educator to give any sort of twist to the education he provided. Economic rather than educational considerations ultimately decided the vocation which the boy adopted, and if the authorities wished to encourage boys to go on to the land, they must first of all make farming conditions attractive.

The best training for rural careers was the building of a foundation rather than a superstructure. More benefit would be derived from learning one basic scientific subject like chemistry really well than by cramming any amount of information, undigested and half-understood, on the subjects of the properties of soils and so forth, which was forgotten almost as soon as it was learned.

If people only realised that in afterlife they forgot the details of almost everything they learned at school, he thought they would hear less of the demand for utilitarian education.