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Professor
George Parkyn (1910-1993) was one of New Zealand's
most distinguished scholars in the field of educational
research, with an international career that took him
to Paris to work with UNESCO and to universities in
the USA and England. In New Zealand, he served as
Director of the New Zealand Council for Educational
Research (NZCER), produced the research that led to
our current university assessment system, and became
an expert in distance learning.
He
was interested in gifted education throughout his
long career and was founding patron of the New Zealand
Association for Gifted Children from 1975 until his
death in 1993. His book "Children of High Intelligence:
A New Zealand Study" (1948) was the first book
on giftedness to be published in New Zealand. He later
wrote on many related topics, such as the measurement
of giftedness and the mental health of the gifted
child.
In
1975 he was invited to be one of the keynote speakers
at the First World Conference on Gifted and Talented
Children, held in London. There he delivered a remarkable
paper in which he challenged the conventional view
of the nature and significance of giftedness with
a concept of giftedness that embraced the aesthetic
and ethical dimensions of life and looked forward
to the future needs of mankind. Over the next nine
years, he explored and developed this theme further
in a series of papers later edited by Rosemary Cathcart
and Phoebe Meikle, and published by the NZCER.
The
concern that he expressed in these papers for the
future direction of humankind is one now widely shared
by people in all parts of the world and in all walks
of life. The philosophical solutions he suggested
offered us profoundly important starting points for
a new approach to education, and in particular to
education of the gifted.
The
same philosophy informs our approach to One Day School
and underlies the REACH model on which the programme
is built.
The
Centre was originally named after George Parkyn firstly
in recognition of his huge contribution to our understanding
of gifted children, but most of all because in himself
he embodied the qualities of wisdom, compassion, open-mindedness,
generosity, humour and intellectual and personal integrity
that we hope to see emerging in every gifted child.
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