School at Home

New Zealand Listener, Volume 17, Issue 419, 4 July 1947, Page 5

School at Home

has.made so much progress in its first 25 years that it would be bold to set limits for the next 25. No one would have believed ten years ago, when the roll number was already 2,700, that another decade would see it ey doubled, and it would have sounded quite crazy ‘ten years eatlier to sdy that the 600-700 pupils then enrolled would have been replaced by six or seven thousand before 1950. But the enrolment graph in the Silver Jubilee record. shows only two slight checks between 300 and 5,300, and the steepest rise is for the period through which we are now passing. If there is a horizon- . tal level ahead it is.clearly a long way ahead, and the problem in the meantime is to. organise fast enough behind the lines to keep this growing army fed. It is greatly to the credit of the Headmaster and his staff that the feeding is so well done at present-that no teacher is satisfied with the bare bones of education or thinks that it is not possible to do by correspondence what is everywhere done in the schoolroom. The. balance tips slightly the other way; what it is not always possible to do in large class-rooms it has often been found possible to do in individual homes, and the result is that the syllabus of the Correspondence School is almost incredibly full and flexible. The School has in fact reached the point of peril at which everyone praises it, but there ought to be security in the contacts it maintains with its past pupils. Instead of keeping them dispersed, so that ferey can’t put their heads together, (eae School assembles them as often as it can and encourages them to keep in touch. It is all an extraordinary development which it is no longer possible to call an experiment; but the bigger _ the School grows the more necessary it is to see that it grows like a tree and not like a snowball. et in Correspondence School ws