Inspector's Day

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 470, 25 June 1948, Page 5

Inspector's Day

ERVOUS teachers will sleep ‘| «better now that surprise visits by inspectors have ceased, and worried reactionaries will be more firmly convinced than ever that education is going to the dogs. The official view of the matter is that "teachers are professional people, entitled to be treated as such"; but aren’t we all? If a professional person is insulted by a surpfise visit from an inspector, what should be the réaction of a railway-ggard or a tram-con-ductor, or of a car-driver ‘of any occupation who has forgotten to renew his licence? What is the reaction of those people? If it is not mild resentment kept in control by a secret awareness of other sins; it is at least a feeling of resignation to an annoyance that they know to be necessary. There would be no public sympathy at all for a lawyer who refused to produce his warrant of fitness on the ground that he was a lawyer, a gentleman by tradition as well as by Act of Parliament, and it is surely the wrong defence to say that teachers, because they are teachers, must not be suspected of the weaknesses of ordinary mortals. But the teachers themselves make no such demand. They want notice of the inspector’s visit, they say, "to avoid, where possible, clashes with other visiting staff" . (medical officers, physical education and art specialists, and so on); and although that is not a very good reason either, since inspectors ought to see everything that goes on in.a school and not merely what goes on the day it is known they will be present, it is a better reason than the claim of professional privilege. But surely the best, and sufficient, reason is that an inspector is an inspector and not a policeman-a higher-grade teacher who makes suggestions for correcting what he sees to be wrong and gives encouragement to what he thinks is right. The policeman-inspector, if he ever lived, is dead. There is no reason why any teacher should make special preparations for his successor. :