AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION

New Zealand Listener, Volume 29, Issue 736, 21 August 1953, Page 13

AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION

THE DEVELOPMENT OF AGRICULTURAL EDUCATION IN NEW ZEALAND, the Macnillan Brown lectures, delivered at Canterbury University College in July, 1952, by L. J. Wild; Whitcombe and Tombs, 3/6. N adequate history of agricultural education in New Zealand has still to be written, but L. J. Wild’s Macmillan Brown lectures give in 63 pages a neat and pungent outline of the story. Few people, indeed, are better qualified than Mr. Wild to do this, for he has been closely associated with the land and with agricultural education all his life; ‘and his own original éontribution as first headmaster of the Feilding Agricultural High School has left permanent evidence of his ability not only to grasp the essentials of the problems of agricultural education at the secondary school level but also to create a new and successful institution. The story Mr. Wild tells is complex, and in many ways unhappy. It is essentially the story of a pioneering people trying to face the new problems of earing for the land after the first rich strike had been worked out, but using old educational methods that had been developed to meet other needs in other countries. For the best part of a century,

sallies have been made info the field by primary schools, secondary schools, university colleges, and government departments, yet no one would claim anything more than a very limited success. Even when the needs have been fairly clearly defined-as from time to time they have been-the specific questions of what to teach, and to whom, and by what methods, have seldom been answered successfully. It is perhaps® an over-simplification, but not a distortion, of the course of | history to say that most of the atfempts that have been made to devise an adequate system of agricultural education have failed for much the same _ reason, namely, the difficulty that human beings find in looking directly and freshly at the needs. of a community and then constructing an appropriate educational means ad hoc. Most of our attempts appear to have been cast in a mould of preconceived ideas concerning the aims | and methods of education and the nature and purposes of existing educational | institutions. No doubt this could be said of many branches of.education, but it my not often that the issues are so immediate and tangible as they have been in the field that Mr. Wild has so cléatiy"

surveyed.

G. W.

Parkyn