P-NG Education - From

the Top, Down 20 Natives for Australian Secondary Schools

7JARLY in November it was an- J nounced in Port Moresby that up to 20 scholarships will be lade available in the Territory of apua-New Guinea next year to lable natives to receive secondary iucation in Australia. Applications >r the scholarships closed on No jmber 17—which gave absurdly lort time for anyone to study the heme, although the P-NG Director f Education said during the No jmber meeting of the P-NG Legis ,tive Council that over 100 applica ons had been received.

Other points in the scholarship theme are: ® It originated at the inaugural iceting of the Education Advisory oard in Port Moresby in October; • It is designed to operate only jnding the establishment of native icondary schools in P-NG; • Candidates for selection may J nominated by virtually anyone i the Territory. • Natives already attending thool in Australia (if any) are igible; • Scholarship winners will be en >lled in North Queensland board ig schools; • Normally, students should not s over 14 years of age, and have le required standards of English, 'ithmetic and mental and social laptability.

L-Advised And Unrealistic

IHE whole plan appears to be pre . cipitate, ill-advised, unrealistic and to be completely worthless ■ the general policy of taking lucation to the great mass of iterate natives of the Territory. it has any virtue, it is only so r as it can be regarded as a smart ece of window-dressing for the 3d members of the United Nations rusteeship Council.

The plan has already caused mis sings, not only amongst the Euro ;an residents of Papua-New ninea, but among native leaders.

European critics will doubtless be cused of bias by the originators the scheme, but a down-to-earth, ahstic survey of what education eans in Papua and New Guinea overdue: From the flood of corre ondence we have received on the bject, it seems very much open to übt whether the authorities could oduce from New Guinea (and in is we exclude Papua where educa m in English is not so new) any ild of 14 or younger who could, Australia, measure up, in general towledge, to a sth Grade child, in the above connection, the irding of the scholarship an uncement, that “normally” can

[idates should not be more than 14, >ems ominous. From the point of

lew of educational qualifications,

le most promising candidates from ew Guinea appear to be the ;eacher-boys”—that is, young men ho are already, according to the ery elastic standards of P-NG, lalified to teach their own people > read and to write and to do very mple arithmetic.

Many of these young men are tarried, or live as married men. re these the scholarship holders ho are to go South and live with 5 and 13-year-olds in Australian larding schools?

It is now an accepted principle tat education should be made avail lie to the natives of the Territory, nd, implicit in that accepted prin ple, is the rider that when they ave reached the same social and iltural level as ourselves, they lould be accepted by us in the full icial sense. If this is not implicit, len it would be better that the isophisticated savage of New uinea is left precisely where he is, ithout European education with s benefits and penalties; ether ise we will soon have on our hands discontented group of people ,ught mid-way between our world id theirs —prospective recruits to ie first brand of Mau-Mauism that itches their fancy.

If there should emerge some llage genius, then by all means, t him be afforded all the educa mal advantages which are ours command —as has been the case Fiji for years. But this could i accomplished without the bally >o of 20 suddenly-offered scholar lips whereby 20 insufficiently pre ired native youths are to be reed through the process of our condary education —for no good ason that can be discovered ex pt in that it brings some doubtful idos to Papua-New Guinea Educa )n Department and makes plain the world that Australia is doing ;r bit in providing secondary ucation for her dependent people the Territory. |N the Director of Education’s " own figures, there are no more than 150 children in NG fit for condary education. It seems :traordinary then that provision nnot be made immediately in the jrritory to provide them with a gher grade of education than that »w available in native primary bools already established.

The more sophisticated natives of ipua and New Guinea ardently isire education in so far as it aches them to read and under md English, for in our ability to ad and to write they believe lies r power. But their own part in quiring “education” is a purely gative one: They believe that the irpose of the teacher is simply to ur the requisite knowledge into em, as water from a jug.

If education has any purpose at I, it is to raise man above the fel of the beast; to provide him

with reasoning ability and help him to look ahead and to plan. But so far as can be ascertained, educa tion, as it exists in P-NG to-day, provides for none of these things.

The children have excellent memories, they copy blackboard notes diligently and with care, and upon these two points the whole education system seems to be suspended. They rarely ask ques tions and any departure from routine is apt to throw the delicate machine of acquiring ready-cut knowledge completely out of gear.

An example was given us in the method of writing a composition.

On the first day, words connected with the proposed subject are writ ten on the blackboard and probably copied into note-books. On a second day, sentences using the words are discussed and probably written into note-books. On yet a third day, the composition is written —and is usually turned out in the precise order in which the words and sentences were used by the teacher.

Six months later they would probably be incapable of writing the same composition.

Teacher-boys in the lower-grades also teach according to a set plan that allows for no innovations. And to illustrate this we have been told this story: A mission inspector visited a school which was in charge of a teacher-boy. The teacher-boy im mediately prepared to go through all the motions according to set lesson number so-and-so.

“All right, class,” he said, “get out your slates.”

There was a pause. “Now get out your pencils.” Another pause. “Now take this down.” The teacher-boy then went to the blackboard and started to write.

“That’s fine,” said the inspector.

“Yes, sir,” wailed the teacher, put ting the teaching routine behind him for a moment. “It would be —but you see, they have no slates!”

IT is inevitable that in a country like Papua-New Guinea, where all but a very few of the large native population have had small contact with Europeans, education in order that they might take their place in the complicated world of to-day will be a problem of extra ordinary complexity. The sympathy of all who know New Guinea must be with the people whose task it is to do this. But sympathisers are merely irritated at gestures like the scholarship scheme, introduced with flourish of trumpets, when they re alise that the foundations of the

educational structure in the Territory are as yet scarcely begun. , New Guinea, with its thousands of languages, its backwardness, is an educationalist's nightmare. Children are between 11 and 13 when they emerge from the village schools to a level where they are taught in English, and even at this late stage there are virtually no points of contact between the cultural background of the pupils and the medium— English—in which they are to be

ta Hfnt.

The very nursery jingles, the fairy stories, the small traditional bits and pieces of knowledge which our own children learn before school age, and which lead naturally to our own system of education, are nothing to these children who are forced to learn in a strange language and against a cultural background that is entirely foreign to them.

Papua-New Guinea is about 50 years behind other Pacific territories in education; and, whatever is done to remedy the situation in the coming generations, it is inevitable that some natives, more intelligent than the rest, will suffer in the general plan to raise the educational level of the whole. This has happened throughout all our own history and surely is no more a tragedy in Papua-New Guinea than it has been with us Put in thp frmnrtQtinnc ™ * u the children f Eneh?h V* 8, + h me cnnaren English, if that is to

be the general plan, as early in their lives as possible; leave the fancy scroll-work, in the form of secondary school scholarships, to time and to future generations. The leeway that has to be made up in education for New Guinea natives is not going to be accomplished in two years, or 10—no matter how ardently Australian departmental window-dressers may wish it. j n the meantime, the P-NG natives probably have a great more of W orth to be learned from their Pacific neighbours than from Australia and, in this regard, the Rev f. G. Lewis, a Missionary member of the Papua-New Guinea Legislative Council, has made a valuable contribution to the solution of the problem. He believes that it would be a major blunder to send isolated groups of native children to Australia where they will forget their own culture, only partially digest ours and become more or less outcasts among their own people.

If, he says, they went to more advanced Pacific Islands where the people had a similar culture to their own, it would be a much more valuable experience for them than going to Australia where houses, schools, transport and civic matters were in no way akin to those in their own country T * „ , , . rr— the ,., Q V een Victoria School in COul i be Persuaded to accept 20 New Guinea scholars it might

be a very good thing—notwithstand ing the fact that the experimen of sending students from P-NG ti the Suva Medical School has no been an unqualified success, due ti the fact that the lads had not haj a sufficient grounding in Engilsh.

Such a sane course is not, how ever, likely to commend itself ti Australia which is apt to believ that its problems are unique in th field of native administration, am prefers to make its mistakes on th home front rather than to see; assistance from other countries whr have solved these particular pro: blems and left them, years ag» like milestones, way back along th road of progress.

Mr. Sultan Ali, an Indian teache at the Methodist Mission school i:i Ba, Fiji, returned to Fiji recentll after seven months’ deputation work in Australia.

H Three new Methodist Mission recruits sailed for Papua and Nev Guinea from Sydney on the Noc vember Bulolo. They were Sister Jeaj Sinclair, who proceeds to Vunairimj in New Britain. Miss Beryl Wilson who will go to Misima, Papua, as ; teacher, and Mrs. R. Imms, whi was the only woman passenger on the Mur or o when she became a tota wreck 50 miles from Rockhampton who now proceeds to Salamo to joii. her husband there.