EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE.

Taranaki Daily News, 3 January 1920, Page 8

EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTE.

ANNUAL CONFERENCE,

I By Telegraph.—Press Association. Wellington, Jan. 2. The annual conference of the New Zealand Educational Institute opened today. The president, Mr. C. R. Munro (Auckland), in his opening address, emphasised that the school ought to be essentially a moral institution and its chief end and aim to instil noble ideals of life and duty as well as to express them in conduct of the highest type. Writers on education in recent years kid stress upon the importance of the recognition of the social aspects of education. They desired to get away from the ideal of the efficiency of the individual and to seek instead the training of the individual for the general good of society. But the task was not wholly for the school, but also for the home, the church, the vocation, the press, society itself, each must take its share. The school aimed at turning out pupils efficient in every sense physically, intellectually and morally and he believed the school could attain such a high ideal. Referring to the German and Prussian educational system the president said: "The result we have seen. The whole German nation was animated by one ambition, lust for world power. Had the leaders of the nation devoted the amount of effort and organisation to the inculcation of the real worth of social Ideals there is no place among civilised nations to which their country might not have aspired and attained." . He went on to say that Germany had as her ideal in the schools, universities and in her whole social structure war, and a German nation resting on war. Public schools would be used and had been used to mould nations as their leaders desired and they could be used again in the future with a worthy ideal, not of the glorification of the individual or of the nation but of the ideal of social service.

There were three ways he (Mr. Munro) considered by which the selected ideal could He' achieved, by the corporate life of the school through the methods it employed and through its studies and curriculum. The corporate life of the school had been in a great measure neglected in the past. He believed one of the great weaknesses in New Zealand schools was over-govern-ment by teachers. The fault was not the fault of the teacher but of the system, which placed from 61) to 110 children under tile care of a teacher and virtually made him a drill sergeant. There could be no real education, no development of the individual under such condition*. The prohlem of the large class modified the conception of what was possible in educational methods. The conception of education should be one that would include all the classes of values the attainment of which made better men and women,