THE TECHNICAL ELEMENT IN EDUCATION.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXX, Issue 8874, 7 November 1907, Page 4

THE TECHNICAL ELEMENT IN EDUCATION.

It is an encouraging sign of the times that in all the progressive countries of the world, great and increasing attention is being given by the educational institutions to the problems of divining the latent bent that may exist in each student's brain. Under our present educational system a child enters the elementary schools, and painfully plods his way through the standards, pursuing the same studies and undergoing exactly the same training as all his fellow scholars. This would be all right and proper if they were all intended to ! follow the same occupation, but, under modern conditions, this system, although affording an excellent groundwork for future developments, fails to a great extent in what should' be the primary of all elementary schools—that of discovering the natural aptitude of each indvidual pupil. The greater number of boys on leaving school drift into what may be their lifelong occupation by the purest chance. Ahoy may become a barrister or a baker, a clerk or a carpenter, a preacher or mayhap a plumber, merely, or for no other reason than that his parents or friends know somebody who has a vacancy for a cadet or an apprentice in one or other of those avocations. Diversity in human type is the chiet source alike of social pleasure and of educational perplexity, and although our technical institutions are doing a great and useful work, it should be possible for them to so extend their system that the natural inclinations of children and youths should have free play. The schoolgoing age is one particularly free from dissimulation. You cannot get a schoolboy to show much interest in anything that does not attract him, and it is hard work to keep him from anything that does. Agricultural, mechanical, constructional, chemical, and all other industrial processes should be shown and illustrated, not only in our technical but in our primary schools, and if this were done we would hear much less than we do now of the social misfit—the man who cannot prosper because of his unconj genial occupation.