UNAPPRECIATED PRIVILEGES.

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1516, 12 August 1912, Page 4

UNAPPRECIATED PRIVILEGES.

Among the unappreciated privileges of our education system, according to the evidence which was tendered by various witnesses before the Royal Commission on Education recently, are the benefits of free tuition at secondary schools. Under what is known as tho free-place system, pupils of the primary schools who qualify at the proficiency certificate examinations which are held annually are entitled to enter a secondary institution—high school, day technical school, or district high school—without fee. Free places are. classified as senior and junior, but the purpose of this article will bo sufficiently served by a reference to the junior free-place system. Having, by its firststep along the lines of a policy which nad for its ultimate achievement the addition of the university to the "free list," imposed upon the endowed schools the necessity of providing additional accommodation for a large influx of freeplace pupils from the primary schools, the Government of that day should have seen to it that the valuable privileges extended to the holders of these free.v. laces were not trifled with. In one essential particular it is clear, from the evidence which was given before the Commission, that the system was not sufficiently safeguarded from abuse— a large number of free-place pupils, year after year, left before completing the course. The fees paid by the State on behalf of these free pupils constituted a kind of investment from which dividends in the shape of more efficient citizens would'ultimately accrue. But this efficiency, if we arc to assumo its probability. rests upon a condition that the full course of higher education which previous generations have had to pay for by the sweat of the brow, and which ■ the present generation receives for nothing, must be taken. Wn ni-R rlih! to observe from flip ve.pcirt of tho Rural Commission., that

this importnrtt point has not been overlooked. "... the fa-rents of children entering upon a secondary school course," recommends the Commission, "should be required to undertake that such children will attend regularly at the secondary school for a period of at least two years." The enforcement of this provision will bo a matter of some difficulty, we should imagine, but that some such provision is necessary, no one will dispute.