Individual, community, and formal voluntary association: a study of the members of two play centres

Abstract

Few aspects of education have aroused greater interest in recent years than that of pre-school education. In the main, this interest can be attributed to a desire to equalize social and educational opportunity and to eliminate those gross differences in privilege that cannot be erased by regular schooling. The outcome of this concern has been to cast pre-school education in the role of an agency for social reconstruction. Thus pre-school education is believed to have a compensatory function: to be an antidote to cultural deprivation. See, for example, the arguments for pre-school education in, Great Britain: Department of Education and Science, Children and their Primary Schools, pp.117-119. This study was undertaken in the first place because it was felt that the New Zealand play centre, as an indigenous pre-school institution, should be studied in its own right. It was anticipated too, that a study of play centres would yield the kind of information about community and neighbourhood that might prove helpful to an understanding of New Zealand life.