AFTER SCHOOL — WHAT?

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 119, 3 October 1941, Page 14

AFTER SCHOOL — WHAT?

Reviewed for "The Listener" by

J. E.

STRACHAN

(Principal Rangiora High School)

THE BACKGROUND OF QGUIDANCE. By H. C. McQueen and Others. (N.Z. Council for Educational Research). Printed by Whitcombe & Tombs. HIS is a well documented account of what the children of our New Zealand cities do when they leave primary school. Some get a job, others go on to High School or "Tech." or a private school. What determines their choice? Or do they choose at all? Are family circumstances or personal aptitudes the more important consideration? Why are so many drafted to an academic course? Why are there so many "misfits" at school or at work? Is it the child’s fault, or the school’s? What are the work prospects of boys Who have-no secondary schooling and of those who take an academic course, or engineering? These are some of the questions which McQueen and his five collaborators-Harris, Glasgow, Boyes, O’Halloran, and Woods -all competent research workers, try to answer after a five years’ study of primary school "leavers" in two New Zealand cities, with check figures from a third. * * * [Tt is in many respects a’ disturbing book. The most enthusiastic advocate of freedom cannot be quite happy to discover what elements of chance, operating early in the child’s life, may begin a drift towards futility and frustration,

or the friction of an uncongenial environment. The writers do not argue the case for adult guidance and help in these matters, but the need is implicit in the picture they draw of the New Zealand setting in which a guidance programme must work, and in the difficulties they find to be in the way. The schools are well in the picture. With personal experience of the difficulties in the school situation the authors reflect with regret upon such features as poor co-ordination between primary and post-primary schools, the obsession with uniformity, the inadequacy of the methods of recording and passing on relevant information about the child,

and the effects of so-called liberal courses, claimed to be without vocational bias, by which "from the day that children enter post-primary schools they are gradually edged into a limited number of channels, each of which can lead to only a limited number of destinations," The intermediate schools try to explore aptitudes, but the writers suspect that "the aptitudes discovered tend to be those. for which provision already exists " in the post-primary departments. Those who believe that our democratic system provides fairly equal opportunity to all will find much in this book to make them think. Even in New Zealand, it seems, " socio economic grades" tend to perpetuate themselves. * RX 5S ALTHOUGH this is an interim report, and by no means a pronouncement as to what ought to be done, the book makes many constructive suggestions. Great responsibility must rest with the schools and their. teachers, but parents, employers, administrators and all concerned with the basic problems of our (Continued on next page)

BOOK REVIEWS (Continued from previous page) community life have their responsibility too. The authors are concerned, for example, with the lack of reliable information on the absorptive capacity of industry, with the need for competent advice to boys staying too long in blind alley occupations, and with the evidence they find of "a proportion of juvenile labour considerably in excess of the estimated minimum" (based on absorptive capacity for adults) "in a number of industries." McQueen and his colleagues have done a good work in preparing this report. Even though they have, as they suggest, raised more questions than they have been able to answer, they have shown the lines on which future work must be done. They are to be commended for the patient care they have shown in collecting their data, for their clear and interesting presentation, and for their restraint in drawing conclusions. The New Zealand Council for Educational Research has added a valuable work to its already imposing collection of research studies. We join with Professor Lawson who, in his Foreword, offers " congratulations to the six collaborators (and, to Mary Redmond, who drew the diagrams) for the vast sums of labour they have bestowed on their tasks."