London Normal School - Spectrum Yearbook (London, Ontario Canada)

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ONTARIO «.tcd OF EDUCATION TO THE STUDEK ' oF THE LONDON TEACHERS ' COLLEGE Hamilton, North Bay, — oi t0 . day should he no less teacher education in U. Provmce, hutt within mem orahle. l e P ' H9 homes have teen provmed for 9 r A second „ for London « ££lZ » — — 1969 ' Thus , while several o£ our C «— -J rschoolswasnCT e rm o r e insist. part to play. The call for earnest effort „ you - - ear, «. ,our = - - » pupU£ en)oy „ « have displayed while at the CoUege , rk „ eU done . B » a ffiea sure the satisfactions that come from w measure to welcome you to the teachm, profession, g0 od wishes for success and happiness. TORONTO, January 2nd, 1958. ' ?KDunlop Minis ' of Education. Page U

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A frame of beams and steel, walls of cold brick and masonry stand, firm-planted, bold-faced against a half a hundred years. Within, a youthful, corporate heart warmed by filial love, by loyalty, by happy retrospection, beats and shall beat with steady strength, transcending change of outward form or place.

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Spectrum F. C. BlEHL A Message To The Graduating Class 1958 lOU begin your life ' s work at a time when the roof and walls and indeed the foundations themselves of the house of education are being probed for their soundness. The principles under which this house was constructed are under attack; principles of a movement which dominated our thinking in elementary schooling for the past thirty years. I speak of course of the Progressive philosophy which held that the needs of children as children should govern the whole design of their schooling; that what a child felt he wanted at the age of six or eight or fourteen should decide not only what he learned in school at these ages, but also how he learned it; that to become adept at getting along with one ' s fellows was more important than storing one ' s mind with the data necessary for thinking, and at the same time practising one ' s mind in the habit of thinking. Such a philosophy, like other somewhat related philoso- phies of government and economics, might be ideal ones to follow in an ideal world. But our present world is far from that. Late in 1957 a new word was joined to the vocabulary of every English-speaking person in a matter of a few. days; at the same time every thinking English-speaking person received a terrible jolt to his easy-going philosophy. The word of course was Sputnik ; the rude fact beyond it is that in order to survive every one of us must begin to think much less of his own demands upon society, and much more of his duties to society, if he is to have any sort of acceptable society in which to live at all. This is the kind of world into which children are being born today. This is the kind of world for which they must prepare, and this is the world for which it is your job to prepare them. Now I think that you can do this without losing some of the best of that wave of educational philosophy which has just spent itself. We can demand all that a child can do, without falling into the ditch on either side; the reactionary one of demanding more from a child than he is endowed to do; or the Progressive one of asking of a child only what at this particular time he feels he wants to do. We can use the vital learning forces of interest and purpose; yet avoid both the reactionary pitfall of making learning a matter of drudgery without insight, and at the same time the Progressive one of mistaking whim at the time for abiding purpose. We can have a disciplined school without on the one hand demanding unthinking obedience to a little despot, or on the other hand abdicating firm leadership to mob control. We can help children to work together and to respect the best interests of the group as a whole; we have neither to establish a school society in which everyone is for himself alone, nor yet one in which popularity and group domination of the individual are the working ideals. You begin your career at one of the great turning points — not only in your own work of education, but also in the world ' s history. Your brave new world will be one of stress and challenge. And yet, with youth on your side, you can feel like another youth at another time of crux and change, back at the beginning of the French Revolution, and like Worsdworth at that time say that Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven! — F. C. BIEHL Page 5