INSPECTION ASKED

Evening Post, Volume CX, Issue 137, 8 December 1930, Page 15

INSPECTION ASKED

BRITISH PRIVATE SCHOOLS

A writer in "Time and Tide" is very severe about private schools for girls in the United Kingdom. The following statement will probably interest many people who have given consideration to tho private school question in the Dominion, the same points,about "false values and expensive amusements" having been mentioned more than once. The writer in the English paper says: "The Association of Head Mistresses has been demanding the inspection of private schools and telling a few liometrullis_ about their present conditions. It was time that somebody made this protest, and time that it was heard, for it is amazing, in "a country which professes to believe in education and. iv the importance of a child's formative years, that we toleralo tho inefficiency and squalor of ilio shabby genteel private school, or the snobbery and vulgarity of the richer typo. The examples given at the Head Mistresses' Conference were mostly taken from those dilapidated small establishments set up by people who have failed to make a living any other way, in the disastrous belief that any fool can teach children. "A notorious case recently aroused public attention to the danger incurred by reckless parents, who entrust their children, usually young children, to this type of institution. But no less dangerous in their ultimate effect on the community are those private schools for girls, handsomely equipped and highly profitable, where the daughters of wealthy parents are sent to be finished, and finished indeed, emerging from their education with an^ impressively complete set of false values, and a total inability to do anything but pass their time in expensive amusements. Only a thorough and compulsory system of Government inspection can check this unqualified evil."