EDUCATION SYSTEM.

Taranaki Daily News, 14 February 1921, Page 7

EDUCATION SYSTEM.

“NOT A FAILURE.” SOLDIERS’ EDUCATION. Mr. G. Pitcaithly (Auckland) claimed at the Educational Conference at Wellington that the well-proved quality of our soldiers during the great war showed conclusively that our educational system was by no means the failure that some people said it was. Th© Minister of Education (the Hon. C. J. Parr) stated that he was sorry to say that the reports he had received from the censors : of our soldiers’ letters did not bear out the claim that they were well taught. The writing and spelling, he was told, were bad; and, as for punctuation, they did not seem to know a full-stop from a comma. He had also been told that their powers of expression were exceedingly limited. An inspector: “I question that.” (Laughter.) The Minister: “I mean their powers of expression in the home letter.” (Laughter.) Mr. Pitcaithly said that he had referred to the character of the men—their courage, their patriotism, their self-sacrificfe, and so on-—rather than to their scholastic attainments. An educational system that did not produce men was no good; and after the experience in the great war it could not be said that our New Zealand system of education did not produce men. Mr. Parr said that he quite agreed with Mr. Pitcaithly on that point; but what he wanted to know was whether our system was producing adequate results from the scholastic point of view.