The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1925. EDUCATION CONTROL.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 223, 20 September 1928, Page 6

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORPORATED The Evening News, Morning News and The Echo

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 20, 1925. EDUCATION CONTROL.

For the cause that lacks assistance, For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance, And the good that tee can do.

We cannot congratulate the Leader of the Legislative Council on his defence of the Department of Education against the criticism to which it was subjected last night. The remarks made by the Hon. G. M. Thomson and the Hon. G. J. Garland as to the domination oi the Education Boards by the Department were perfectly legitimate comment upon the mattei under discussion, and it is rather surprising that Sir Francis Bell should have thought it necessary not only to assert his views on the need for centralised authority in very uncompromising terms, but also to make an attack upon the Education Boards which the facts oi the case certainly do not justify. Both Mr. Thomson and Mr. Garland protested against the constant extension and exaggeration of the Department's powers which have reduced the Boards in recent years to a condition of almost absolute impotence. The facts are notorious, and every local body connected with education in this country has from time to time complained of these encroachments by the central authority on its functions. Now Sir Francis Bell asks us to believe that the difficulties that have arisen between the Department and the local educational bodies have been due to the lack of amicable feeling displayed by the Boards and their desire to control and disburse the funds voted by Parliament for educational purposes, We protest indignantly against such imputations, levelled as they are at a large body oi men and women who have almost invariably displayed a very high order of public spirit ir the discharge of an onerous and generally thankless task. Sir Francis Bell is ready tc guarantee that the Departmental officials art anxious to work amicably with the Boards, anc that they have only one object in view—"the promotion of educational welfare." But whal right has he or any other public man to asser! that the Boards and their members art actuated by less worthy motives? But the true inwardness of Sir Francis Bell's prejudice against the Boards, and his sensitiveness to any criticism of the Department, comes out most clearly in his remarks on the need for centralising educational control. To him "the educational boards are i relic of the provincial system of government,' and on that ground he regards them as sufficiently condemned. In other words, Sir Francis Bell repudiates the Boards because they were originally established under the best system oi local self-government that this country evei enjoyed. That is the root of the whole matter. Sir Francis Bell-—and we presume that he speaks on such a question not only for the Department, but for the Reform Ministry and its party —publicly professes his dislike of the whole system of local administration, and demands that the management of our State education shall be monopolised by the Department itself. All this, of course, is hopelessly incompatible with democratic principles and with the traditional practice of local autonomy on which all British political constitutions are so largely founded. But at all events we have to thank Sir Francis Bell for telling the country so frankly that he and his party are the declared enemies of local self-government and the advocates of centralisation.