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

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MINISTER OF EDUCATION It is a pleasure for me, as Minister of Education, to welcome to the teaching profession the 1967 graduates of the London Teachers ' College. You are entering service in the schools of Ontario in an era of great change in thought and practice. The years ahead will, I am sure, provide new, interesting and rewarding avenues for your contribution to education. In but a few months you will take charge of your own classroom. You have been well prepared for the immediate tasks which face you, and you will grow quickly in experience and ability. It is my hope that you will also grow intellectually as you search for improvement in your teaching skills and take advantage of the many cours- es for teachers offered by the Department of Education and the Universities of Ontario. The world of the late neneteen sixties and the early nineteen seventies will demand much of its youth. Your responsibilities as a teacher are increasingly more exacting and more demanding than they were for the teacher of a generation ago. You carry with you into your teaching positions the confidence and the best wishes of the staff of your College and the Department of Education. May your days as a teacher find you dedicated and enthusiastic as you prepare our children for their fu- ture roles as citizens of our great land ! William G. Davis Minister of Education Toronto, December 30, 1966

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PRIME MINISTER • PREMIER MINISTRE CANADA I am pleased to extend warm congratulations from the Government of Canada, together with my own, to all the Centennial Year teachers and students of London Teachers ' College. In its first 100 years Canada has grown in stature and status beyond the dreams of Sir John A. Macdonald and Cartier and the other Founding Fathers. We have achiev- ed much in this country. What we will be doing during our Centennial Year is acknowledging this Canadian achievement. We have proud traditions from the past. We have our attachments to language and culture arising from our origins and our origins are various. But we are also a people of today, moving forward to a great destiny as a strong and united We can rejoice in being citizens of this great land. I invite you to share with me this exercise of Canadian faith, in the confidence that we are a nation worthy of our heritage; that we have a rich past on which to build a great destiny for all members of the Canadian family. Equally important to me is my testament to youth. May I take this opportunity to express my faith in you, my belief that your generation will find the resources of mind and heart to translate your hopes into positive, lasting achievement wherever there is a human need - and that is everywhere. country. Ottawa, 1 9 6 7. L. B, Pearson. 4

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PRINCIPAL OF TEACHERS ' COLLEGE You enter your life ' s work at a time when change is rocketting through our world. In some of the sciences more discoveries have been made within the last ten years than in all previous human history. Many of the things we use daily -- among others, commercial television, jet flight, the means of pre- venting polio -- were unknown as recently as your first birthday. So it is right and fitting that much of what you teach children today should differ, not only in what it is made up of, but in how children learn it. You know something of how courses in mathematics and science and social studies are being turned upside down; and you have seen such things as team teaching and programmed learning. It is unlikely that Canadian parents will be content to have their children taught neither more or less than they themselves were taught, and by the same kind of teachers they had themselves when they were young. Yet when all this is accepted, there is an old German proverb that we should remember. It goes something like this: Don ' t throw out the baby along with the bath water. Because some things are old, it does not mean that they are outdated. In fact some of these old things are needed more in today ' s world than ever before. For, you see, servo-mechanisms and computers are after all only tools, and few of us would subscribe altogether to the materialist ' s definition of man as a tool-using animal. Some of us are really frightened today that man, like Mary Shelley ' s Frankenstein, is in danger of being the victim of his mechanical creations. So there are some very old things which young modern teachers might well cherish, and these are really the very things which make man more than a tool-using animal. There are the questions which the ancient Greeks asked about man twenty-five hundred years ago, and which each generation needs to ask of itself again. There are those treasures of literature and the arts which man, if he were only the most dexterous of the apes, could never have risen to. And there is a moral code created by a Man of Bethlehem, whose measure none of us, in the two thousand years since, has ever been able to fill. So all of us, both as persons and as teachers, might pause occasionally among the dizzy wonders of this brave new world, and reflect upon those achievements of the past which are neither outdated nor reactionary, but are indeed needed more today than ever before. F. C. BIEHL