YOUR CHILD AT SCHOOL

New Zealand Listener, Volume 34, Issue 873, 27 April 1956, Page 5

YOUR CHILD AT SCHOOL

Sir,-While noting that J.R.A. only suggests that in New Zealand educational standards are being lowered, I would like to dispute his stand most emphatically. The content of education has altered to exclude some subjects and simplify others, making the curriculum more closely related to children’s interests. Within the changed content I would say unhesitatingly that the standard has been raised considerably, particularly in art and music where specialist teaching is available to all schools. And yet I am forced to agree with J.R.A., the Universities, the Charnber of Commerce and so forth that some very substandard products seem to find their way on to the intellectual market. But there are other statistics to study. Only one quarter, roughly, of any population is above average intelligence and of that only a few show outstanding ability in any field. Today, not only that quarter but most of the average group have access to our Universities and to positions which before for many and various reasons, from economic to social, went mostly to the very able. It is the emergence of this average section which gives the appearance of lowered educational standards. Study, I am certain, would show that their standards even in overcrowded schools and Universities have, in fact, risen, but they still bear no comparison to the really able of either twenty or thirty years ago or today. J.-R.A. and others who continually compare the moderns in art and music unfavourably with the classics should recall something of the environment of both groups. Mechanisation has had just as obvious an effect on the arts as on any other aspect of our life, Escape into literature, art and music of the lighter, more easily assimilable variety is partly the outcome of a more unsettled society, partly the result of the emergence of the lower class market as its educational standards have risen. The more obscure forms of art, music and literature are, I suggest, a reflection of the obscurity of our future, Lastly, genius in the arts, as in anything else, is sparsely scattered through the ages. A Bach; a Shakespeare, an Einstein are rare

MARIE RAE

(Christchurch).