BITTER FEELINGS.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 223, 20 September 1928, Page 10

BITTER FEELINGS.

CONTROL OF EDUCATION.

"GOING BEYOND THE MARK."!

BOARDS AND DEPARTMENT.

(By Telegraph.—Parliamentary Reporter.)

WELLINGTON, Wednesday.

References in the Legislative Council to-day to a spirit of ill-feeling and bitterness being engendered between the Education Department and various education boards caused the Leader of the Council, himself an ex-Minister of Education, to explain the viewpoint of the Department and vigorously to defend the Minister and his officers. The Hon. G. M. Thomson referred to the conflict between the Department and at least two education boards, and said that the Department was going beyond the mark altogether in its attitude towards boards and other educational bodies. Sir F. D. Bell said that dissension between the boards and the Minister was not denied. The boards were a rehc of the old provincial Governments, and the differences referred to had continued since those days, because provincial Governments wanted to spend money that the general Government provided, and were constantly complaining that they did not get as much as they demanded. Apparently it was suggested that the Government should give the boards their own -way, irrespective of cost. He could not support T? ran^ 18 ex P resse d the opinion that the Department did endeavour to get on with the boards, but he doubted whether their effort to get on was reciprocated to the extent that it might be He believed that the officers of the 1 department were as zealous as the officers of any similar department in anv other part of the world. It was not a carelessly or incompetently officered Department; it was subject to public criticism more than any other Department, because of the present interest that parents took in the «>jbieet <->* education. The Department made mistakes sometimes. If it did not, the officersjrould not be fit for their positions. They could net mtke experiments without making an occasional mistake. He defended the Minister of Education and the Department against the suggestion, first, that they did not honestly endeavour to work with the boards, and secondly, that they were | moved by any other interest than the FgQßMjwg d frturatioß. gndess-

oared to be economical in the administration of a necessarily extravagant Department. Differences, dissensions and quarrels that arose were consequent upon the not unnatural desire of boards |to obtain as much public money as they could get to spend in their own provincial district, and equally to the Department trying to discharge its official duty of preventing the expenditure of unnecessary money, and to ensure equality between the various districts in the distribution of money for the advancement of education. Money alone caused all the differences in each case. He had no doubt it was the honest conviction of boards that they ought to have more money than the Department was allowing them, and that some other board was getting an advantage of it. He did not think the trouble could be remedied unless greater recognition was made by boards that control must be where the purse was, and that the Department had a public duty to the country to perforin as compared with a provincial duty that the boards owed to the children of provinces. In reply to an interjection, he said he had carefully refrained from giving the impression that he had the abolition of the boards at the back of his mind.