POPULAR EDUCATION IN NEW ZEALAND AND ITS DEFECTS.

Evening Star, Issue 3287, 2 September 1873, Page 3

POPULAR EDUCATION IN NEW ZEALAND AND ITS DEFECTS.

The Australian and New Zealand Gazette has the following article in its issue of May 31, to hand by the Suez mail: —“ After immigration, the most efficient means for the rapid development of our Colonial population is a really liberal and comprehensive system of national education. Such a system should be uniform, calculated to encourage to the utmost all parents in sending their children to school early, and especially adapted to counteract the fatal disposition existing among the lower classes to weigh the present and tangible value of child labor against the future and speculative benefits of child-scholarship. Broken up as all countries are into provincial and municipal divisions, national education should be so organised as to prevent the accident of a child’s birth on this or that side of a Governmental boundary being positively injurious to his prospects, and above all, parents should be carefully debarred from all legitimate excuse for keeping their children ignorant, on the ground of unjust and partial educational legislation which favors one section of the same community at the expense perhaps of another. In New Zealand, if possible more even than in Australia, popular education should be wholly untrammelled from such pecuniary obligations as afford parents a valid excuse for denying their children the unspeakable advantages of school instruction. We know how high party, or rather sectarian feeling has run in Victoria, for instance, since the new Education Act came into force, and we have heard of the fierce protests of Auckland when a household rate of LI per annum was imposed for educational purposes. In Auckland, however, admission to the school is free ; the same holds good in Nelson and Wellington ; but in Hawke’s Bay the expense of having a child educated is from LI to L 5 per annum per head. Surely with an uniform household rate levied in each Province there should be no mischievous distinction in the way of school fees, placing the colonist here at a positive disadvantage to the colonist there. It is a serious charge to a working man with a large family, and yet it is exactly their children who stand in urgent need of school training. In Victoria an Education Act providing free and compulsory education crowded the schools with marvellous rapidity, but in Hawke’s Bay, although we believe the child population has actually doubled within the last half-a-dozen years, the schools remain the same. It has been bitterly urged that the working settler, under the provisions of regulations special to this Province, may have to pay for the schooling of his family LSO per annum, and decidedly such a fact cannot be said to render Hawke’s Bay an attractive spot for immigrants. Would it not be far better to abolish all necessarily invidious distinctions between one Province and another, and dispensing at once with rates and fees, render education a charge simply on the general revenue? Popular education brought home and made truly acceptable to the masses of the people is the most effectual and the most economic of all Governmental means for the development of a nation into prosperity; and by generously foregoing the rates—paltry in themselves, but galling in their ap-plication-numberless children would be converted into future producers of power and wealth.