PARENTS’ MISTAKES

Sun (Auckland), Volume III, Issue 890, 6 February 1930, Page 11

PARENTS’ MISTAKES

EDUCATIONAL DIFFICULTIES

“GIVE CHILD HIS CHANCE” “How often parents and teachers are mistaken in their estimate of children,” remarked the Rev. Professor William Hewitson, Moderator of the Presbyterian General Assembly, during his speech in opening the Dingwall Presbyterian Orphanage this afternoon. “They are caught by the bright boy who is like the runner and who can put up a brilliant performance in 100 .yards, but who tires at the fourth lap and drops out at the sixth in the three-mile race,” said the professor. “When we think of the mind of a child, using that term widely enough to cover the intellectual and the emotional life, we are struck at once by the great differences between children, differences in the degree of their powers and of their kind. “It sometimes happens that the boy with clever hands has not much of a head and the boy with a good head . has very awkward hands,” he continued. “If these differences in powers and temperament are to be recognised and appreciated in order that each child shall have its proper training and development, there is need for close, sympathetic and individual observation. Education and training are not a common mould into which every child is to be squeezed. Education has to be fitted to the child and not the child to education. To do this requires intuition, observation, often long continued and sometimes modified by experiment.” Such care of the mind of a child must necessarily be individual and could only be given in small groups. That he supposed was why babies normally came into a home one at a time, and not in threes and sevens, as with some of the animals, it was the imperative need of individual care and of fitting the educa- : tion to the child and not the child to education that was behind the call for smaller school classes.

It was the same imperative need of individual personal attention that had led to the displacement of large orphanages with the military mass discipline by cottage hom.es with a house mother who could study and know each child in all the natural peculiarities of its physical, intellectual and emotional life. A uniform method of training and discipline would no more suit all the children in a home than one suit of clothes would.