WORLD CONFERENCE OF ORGANISATIONS OF
THE TEACHING PRC?' ESSCN
SYDNEY 4 AUGUST 1970
speech by the 2rime Minister, Mr. Joohi Gorton
Mr. President, Distinguished Guests and Ladies and Gentlemen:
By way of a preface to what I have to say to you, may I say two things.
One is that I have learnt by experience that I am always so pleased to have the ordeal
of making a speech over that I almost always forget to open whatever it is the speech
is designed to open. And therefore in case this should happen tonight and to be on
the safe side I want at the beginning to make it quite clear that this is the opening
of thi, conference, even if I forget to zcy so at the end'
The other thing which struck me was something you referred to, Sir, in
your speech about a remark made by my colleague, the Commonwealth Minister for
Education, that nobody visits Australia by accident. I always agree with my colleagues,
and I am sure that in the present day, this is en-tirely correct. And yet in this
Bicentenary Year, my mind goes back to a gentleman who probably didn't visit
Australia entirely by design. His name was Captai-n-Cook:
Sir, this is the first international conference of teachers' organisations
ever held in Australia, and it falls in the year designated by the United Nations General
Assembly as " International Education Year". And on behalf of the Australian
Government and people, I welcome you to our country a-: d assure you we are glad
to have you with us as individuals and that we are proud indeed to be the host country
for this international conference.
The conference theme of course is " The Cualities of a Teacher" a
discussion I take it of what qualities are needed to male a good teacher and by
selecting this as the theme, I believe that the organisers of the conference have gone
right to the heart and soul of any education system for physical requirements for
education -buildings, classrooms, libraries, language laboratories and so on, and the
external aids to education such as radio, television, the projector necessary as
they are are no substitute for a good teacher. A3 aids to a good teacher they are
admirable but as a substitute for a good teacher they are abominable. So I add
congratulations to the conference on its choice of a theme,
Now I spend a good deal of my time being told by teachers what to do, and
what not to do and I expect that this will continue ( and I hope it does), so I propose
to seize this opportunity, with all the apprehension proer when a layman speaks
to experts, to put this layman's view of what the aims cf education ought to be, of
how we may best achieve these aims, and of the qualities a teacher needs to play his
full part in this achievement.
Well, what should the aims of education be? It is no good talking of those
aims in phrases such as " modern education for a modern world" or " education geared
to the social needs of the modern community", because I am afraid that on examination
such phrases too often turn out to be only plausible lullabies designed as lullabies to
put the enquiring mind to sleep.
I would suggest that the proper, and primary, and overriding goal of
education is the creation of a community of human beings who are as nearly perfect as
human nature, and the individual variations of talent and personality will allow. This,
you will agree, is quite a goal. Yet I believe it is the ultimate goal and that it is
better for education to fail in the attempt to make a perfect human being than to
succeed in making only a fully competent technician. It is better to try to develop
perfect himan beings through education than to confine ourselves to the subsidiary
goal easier and perhaps more practicable though that may be of trying to turn
our only good scientists, or good engineers, or lawyers, or technicians or teachers.
In the words of Sir Richard Livingstone:-
" May not the desire to make first rate human beings and a
first rate society be a master whom all would serve. To see the vision of
excellence as far as our limitations allow; to get at least a glimpse of
the unchanging values of the eternal and good an: d to ma: e our infinitesimal
contributions towards a society which will embody these values is not that,
in itself, a sufficient motive for life.
I think it is and that is more than you can say for studies confined to electricity,
or the workings of computers, or medicine. Not that these studies are not good and
necessary for they are but they are subsidiary and not an end in themselves.
The good teacher indeed has many such subsidiary tasks widening the
mind and enlarging its interest, training the intelligence, teaching the multitudinous
techniques on which our civilisation is somewhat precariously based but I believe
we could successfully carry through all these subsidiary tasks and still never attain
the true goal of education as I have defined it.
For what raises man above the savage is not his inventions or his science,
his economies or his technology it is the practice of goodness and kindness towards
other men, it is the appreciation of the love of beauty a:. d truth and the application of
reason. And so whatever a child is going to be, whatever speciality he may wish
to study, or need to study in order to make a living, and: however well he may be
taught that speciality, failure to inculcate those qualities means, I suggest that
education has failed to achieve its true goal.
Well, what part do the schools of various kinds play in helping this
achievement and the teachers in those schools for I suggest that each type of school
has its definite function in achieving this aim. / 3
I suggest that it is the primary and overriding responsibility of the
primary school to teach reading, writing, elementary mathematics, and english
grammar, for those are the tools with which knowledge is mined and unless the child
is adequately provided with such tools, the secondary school and tertiary education
can do little. Nor, I believe, can such skills be taught in an " easy" way. They should
be taught in such a way that in learning them the child automatically learns to sit down
and concentrate, to gain the habit of work, and above all, to develop, as he will under
a good teacher, the faculty of reasoning for himself. All other activities of the
primary school are secondary to these. Good spelling is useful but not essential, as
Shakespeare dramatically showed. The development cf creative work is important
but can t-ke place cut of school as well as in it. The amount of history which can be
taught to a child before the age of eleven is usually meaningless, and almost always
inaccurate and so on.
I do not say the primary school should ignore these activities. Not at all,
but I do say that the good primary school teacher will keep them in their proper
perspective and that is subordinate to the tas: k of turn_. g our a child who can write
legibly, express simple thoughts clearly and unambiguously by the use of good grammar,
read with ease, solve simple mathematical problems and reason out from data which
he knows to be true, why something else which he does not know must in fact be
true. And so what qualities does a primary school teacher need to do this? It
is claimed that one essential is a university degree and additional years of teacher
training. With some trepidation I challenge this. Such qualifications, of course, are
useful and helpful, but I doubt whether they are essential, in the sense that no one
can be a good primary school teacher without them, and I am sure that such qualifications
in themselves or of themselves, and them alone do not automatically make a good
teacher. The qualities needed for a really good primary school teacher are
dedication the feeling that one is following a calling, a vocation, which alone can
give full satisfaction in work; a genuine love of children which accepts the undoubted
fact that they can on occasion be absolute little horrors; a warm feeling of achievement
and adventure when at last, after many attempts to explain something which has not
been understood, the light of understanding suddenly lights the eye of the child being
taught. Such teachers must have the capacity to take each child and break the new
and puzzling situat ion which it is facing into simpler bits. They must discover what
the child does know, as a starting point, and lead its mind in the right order from one
bit to the next until finally the whole is understood. But what those simpler bits are,
and what is the right order, varies with each child and no-one can know it ahead of
time. That is why teaching is an art. / 4
There are, I think, other requisites for a good primary school teacher.
Firstly, I think he should not be swayed by the tides of fashion in educational theory,
for fashions in educational theory change more slowly but just as surely as do fashions
in skirts. So he should never be swayed to the belief that, even in primary schools,
discipline and hard, repetitive, monotonous work is no longer necessary. It is
necessary where it is essential and it is very often essential.
In any branch of study some facts must be : ingrained on the mind so they
can be brought out at a second's notice and some techniques have to be followed
smoothly, quickly and automatically without conscious thought. So the teacher should
explain why such hard, monotonous work is necessary, He should tell the child the
purpose of learning some particular, repetitive, task so that even if the child doesn't
fully understand that purpose he does at least know that there is one and therefore the
task itself becomes that much less meaningless and arbitrary.
But there are occasions when what I shall call good, old fashioned drill
is necessary and a good teacher should not excuse the pupil from it, for after all,
the task of the teacher is not so much to make learning easy, as to make it an
understandable, a reasonable, a logical and an exciting thing to do.
Secondly, such a teacher should not be so carried away by his belief that
all children should be equal in ability as to shut his eyes to the demonstrable fact
that they are not.
Ruskin wrote
" Two children go to school hand in hand and spell for
half an hour o'er the same page. Through all their
lives never shall they spell from the same page more
one is presently a page ahead.... two pages.... ten
pages and evermore though each toils equally, the
interval enlarges".
The good teacher must accept that. He must encourage that ability not
fight against it, for he cannot destroy ability even in the name of equality but he can
cramp it or maim it. And he will do this just as surely by preventing a child from
developing at his natural pace as he will by trying to force it to develop faster than
it naturally would. I have so far spoken of the qualities necessary for the primary school
teacher. The secondary school teacher of quality needs all these and a greater
specialised knowledge for it is in the secondary school that the mining of knowledge
really begins. It is here that the tools provided by the primary schools are tested.
It is here that the process of specialization starts. All I shall say of this is that
whatever specialization is selected, the centre of studies should be as I said
at the beginning the study of human striving, and hurna:: greatness in action in the
past, and the study of various human ideas of how to build that ideal society, which
gives the greatest possible freedom to each individual, and avoids the licence which
follows if that individual interferes with others' rights.
And also each pupil ought to study at least one subject on the curriculum
so thoroughly, and in such depth, that he begins to know what true knowledge really
is and how much industry, thoroughness, precision, and persistence it requires if
he is to have even a distant sight of it. And so the teacher here needs not only the
qualities of being able to impart knowledge, of being able to make learning an exciting
experience, but also, a much greater knowledge of that subject or subjects which
he teaches. The numbers receiving education in Australia are growing so dramatically,
the numbers of pupils remaining at school to the final year of secondary education
are increasing so greatly, that I doubt if there are enough young Australians possessed
of what I have described as the qualities needed by an ideal teacher.
But it is no bad thing to set out an ideal even if it cannot at once be
attained. And indeed I think that is the object of the thene chosen by this conference.
Sir, I have shown temerity tonight as a layman in speaking to experts,
and I have, I expect, been slightly pompous I hope only slightly, but may I in
conclusion close by saying something on my own behalf which demonstrates that
I have more than a passing interest in this subject.
I was placed in charge of Commonwealth Government activities in
education some seven years ago, and was the first Comrnmonwealth Minister of
Education. At that time the Commonwealth Governmen-t was spending $ 67.5 million
a year. Today it is spending $ 312 million a year some five times as much. I
put into operation a scheme of supplying science laboratories, properly planned and
equipped, to all secondary schools in Australia. I had adopted a scheme to provide
libraries not just repositories for books but modern libraries complete with
teaching aids, in all secondary schools in Australia. I inaugurated a scheme designed
to revolutionise and re-equip all secondary technical schools in Australia. I brought
in a scheme to provide eight now ten million dollars a year for building
teachers colleges. I inaugurated a scheme for providing colleges of advanced
education as alternatives to universities in tertiary education.
I rejected the previous concept that the state should penalise children
whose parents send them to non-government schools by refusing such schools any
assistance from the taxpayers' funds, even though the ; parents of such children
contributed to those funds. I still reject that concept and I am proud to do so, for it
is educationally illiterate and economically absurd.
I put into operation a scheme for providing scholarships for the last two
years of secondary school, and in technical schools.
Sir, I have been interested. And if the ideal physical requirements for
education have not been attained and of course they have not at least we have taken
steps towards such attainment, as you are seeking to tak e steps towards the attainment
of an ideal teacher. Because of that interest that is one reason I have been
emboldened to speak to you tonight. Another is because you all bear such responsibility
for moulding the citizens of the world of tomorrow, and yet another is because you
asked me. I thank you for it and I have done, and this conference is open.