The training of teachers in New Zealand during the nineteenth century

Abstract

The teacher is the agent of society in imposing upon its children a scale of values and a body of knowledge in harmony with those values: he therefore occupies a key position, and his training is central to any system of education. So long as there exists an adequate supply of teachers using more or less common methods and accepting certain basic social concepts, there is a tangible educational foundation and the training problem is in the background; when, however, the supply fails, and when the ranks of teachers are recruited from persons who lack knowledge of teaching methods or whose social philosophy is unacceptable, there is no real foundation on which to build a system, and the need for some method of inducing a core of uniformity becomes urgent. This practical necessity, this need for some uniformity, some basis on which to build, arose in some provinces of New Zealand earlier than in others. Nor was the training of teachers seen immediately as an obvious solution. After all, the tradition of teacher training in Britain was weak, and its beginning can hardly be dated before 1840. Each province met the problem as local circumstances dictated: by bribing trained teachers to desert from elsewhere, by prescribing detailed 'standards' or drawing up minute instructions, by examination and classification, by rigid inspection, by appointing travelling specialists, by conducting small training classes, by establishing pupil-teacher or probationer systems, or by providing normal school training. The system that finally emerged, a colonial fusion of certain English and Scottish models, was not necessarily the one most suited to New Zealand conditions. Economic circumstance provided a frame within which each province had to fit its experiments. Canterbury and Otago were sufficiently wealthy to be able to copy, with but little modification, British models, and establish them so firmly that they were later taken over intact into a national system. Had they been in the position of the poorer provinces, unable to bear the expense of normal training schools and forced to experiment with the colonial material available, it is at least possible that a system meeting more adequately the educational needs of the New Zealand environment might have developed.