Modified to Suit All Types

New Zealand Listener, Volume 4, Issue 96, 24 April 1941, Page 5

Modified to Suit All Types

HE ideals of universal education were brough¢ to realisation by the industrial revolution, and mass education was extended over a longer and longer period of the child’s life. This would seem to mean the suppression of individuality. Far from it, however. The very fact that all children went to the schools, meant that children of all types went-the average children and the dull children as well as the bright ones. Teaching methods had to be adapted to the varying capacities of these children. Furthermore, when the children from the elementary schools were admitted in large numbers to the secondary schools which had been the close preserves of the select few, the secondary schools had to modify their literary curriculum and indeed their whole conception of education, in order to provide educational material suited to the diverse types of children they were beginning to receive. And with the development of different courses in the secondary schools

has come the need for some means of helping children to discover their aptitudes-and interest, in order that they may make a wise choice of their secondary school course. Thus we have the recent development of intermediate schools, whose specific purpose is to offer exploratory cOurses, which will make such a choice possible. The ideal of adapting education to the needs of the individual is being carried a stage further by the establishment of special schools and classes for children presenting particular difficulties. -("Modern Trends in Education," by G. W. Parkyn, M.A., Dip.Ed., University of Otago, 4YA, April 1.)