Mr Simmons on Otago Education.

Cromwell Argus, Volume V, Issue 262, 6 October 1874, Page 6

Mr Simmons on Otago Education.

In the course of a letter to the Nelson. Colonist, Mr F. C. Simmons, Rector of Helsoh College, (formerly of the High School, Dunedin,) says : —“ I know from painful experience how hard it is for a schoolmaster to do his duty in Otago, where he is liable to be assailed periodically, by the most ignorant of the not too intellectual gentlemen who adorn the Provincial Council and Established Church Courts of that Province, and by those very fluent critics, whose venomous effusions, strangely enough, are published in a paper so respectable as the Daily Times. By these attacks a teacher’s mind must necessarily be distracted from his work, which demands his whole energies ; while, as boys read newspapers, he is compelled to resort to great strictness to preserve that discipline, without which school teaching is not possible. Mjf Hawthorne and his colleagues have my warmest sympathy in their difficult position. If the result of the “ lavish expenditure” on education in Otago are imsatisfactory and inadequate, the public and Press of Dunedin are mainly to blame ; while no small share of such success as we have secured is due to the wise policy of our governors, to the kindly sympathy of the Press, and to the warm in terest taken in education by the public of this Province. As long as Otago permits its educational institutions to be controlled by Provincial politicians and popular preachers, instead of bodies chosen as here, for the especial purpose, the results of an expenditure, however ‘lavish,’ will be inadequate and unsatisfactory, and the evil can only be aggravated by the most respectable journals opening their columns to communications calumnious, if not actually libellous, which sap all discipline.”