THE EDUCATION BILL AND THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.

Dominion, Volume 8, Issue 2288, 23 October 1914, Page 3

THE EDUCATION BILL AND THE LEGISLATIVE COUNCIL.

Sir, —An opportunity is now offered to the Legislative Council to prove itself a revising Chamber composed of statesmen whose vision extends beyond the run leading into the vote-catching traps.

Tho Education Bill professes to set up a Council which will have tho supremo control, but tho machinery for tho selection of members of that Council does not contain one single provision respecting tho qualifications of individuals to be appointed or elected. Tho electoral franchise seems to have been designed on the general principle of giving \every dog a bone in order to placate every section on the Parliamentary electoral roll.

The proposal to grant to the paid servants of the governing body of a secondary school the right to elect a member of the Council of Education while the governing body itself remains wholly unrepresented is one which seems fairly open to hostile criticism. ■

T-he proposals with reference to separately ondowed schools seem designed to draw those schools within the not of bureaucracy and one inevitable consequence must be the stifling of all in-

itiative in experiment. It is asserting no new proposition to say that the progress and well-being of the State depend upon the soundness of tho principles for the time being adopted by its Government, and when those principles are propounded by men of one school of thought to fellow-citi-aens brought up in the same or a simi-. lar school of thought there can be neither breadth nor appreciation of criticism. Wtint. wmiM flno nmiiHtirm nf ftmtlt

What would the condition of Great Britain bo if Eton, Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough, Cheltenham, and all the other great public schools had been expropriated a century ago and put under the direction of a Government Board of Education? With the minds of her future statesmen moulded by a course of vocational, studies in accordance with a syllabus prescribed by ii Department, itself the creature of politics, England would have relapsed into a despotic system of government similar, perhaps, to those which civilisation and criticism have in comparatively recent years modified so greatly in the case of certain European countries, or perhaps, into a state of thought so engrained in the minds of the young that when 'rt-hey arrive at maturity any doubt respecting the sacrosanctity of the ruler is effectively stifled.—l am, etc.,