HEADMASTER’S COMPLAINT.

Hokitika Guardian, 27 March 1924, Page 4

HEADMASTER’S COMPLAINT.

CRITICISM OF MINISTER’S ATTITUDE.

WELLINGTON, March 23.

With the support of similar associations at Christchurch and Dunedin, tile Wellington Head Masters’ Association is endeavourng to show through the Press that the recent regulations regrading organisation of schools are both impracticable and undesirable. The head masters complain that they have received scant consideration from the .Minister of Education or lii.s Department. One way, they say, of convincing the public would be merely to publish the regulations and ask them to judge whether they are practicable, seeing that Regulation 3a requires that a head master shall devote the major portion of his time to the work of actual teaching. In order to make their case clearer they have tabulated under Unity heads the duties which by regulation head teachers sre called upon to perform, and have subjoined a carefully considered estimate of the average time per week that is required for each. They note that the Director of Education has ruled that a head master is teaching only when he is in a class room actually giving a lesson. A carefully drafted tabulation shows that preparing and giving twenly-five lessons weekly by the latest approved methods, training pupil teachers, conducting term examinations, issuing reports. outlining schemes of work, inspecting teachers’ diaries, attending to i orrespoiidence, registers and visitors attending to the civic life of the school and other detailed duties would occupy over 51 hours per week. The head masters contend that what is being done efficiently now occupies forty hours per week in and out of regular school time.

The association states that the regulations are inadvisable because they restrict a headmaster as to the means he may use to secure the efficiency of his school, because the head masters know that they can he neither obeyed nor enforced, and that as a consequence they will tend to bring about lax observance of other regulations, because they coni rat 01 ie the principles that should guide one in framing regulations, viz., being necessary, being as few as possible, being definite and being easy to enforce, because if the Department considers these regulations necessary it admits the futility and untrlistworthiness of its own grading list, inasmuch as the teachers affected have been placed high on that list presumably because the Department considers them able and conscientious teachers. II some of them are no longer considered efficient the association points nut that the remedy is to alter their position on the gar-ding list and, if necessary, remove them from their present positions. The headmasters urge the Department to remember the advice i f one of flic Dominion's greatest educationists, Mr R. I log hen, “Dot a good man in charge of the school and leave him alone.’’

Finally the regulations are inadvisable because the Department is unwise to restrict the right of parents to interview the head teachers regarding their children. The head master knows, but apparently the Department does not know, how iinpoitant it is that he should work in co-operation with Patents, especially now that the State is taking over more care of children. The head masters state that they believe the parents and past scholars understand better than does the Education Department the work that is being done in New Zealand schools. No two Ilead masters ci.induct- their schools exactly alike. The personality of teachers lightly shows itself in each. J’ast pupils know that the spirit of selfsacrifice inspiring the work of the vast majority of teachers is an infinitely better tiling than the spirit which the government by regulation will engender. The association is resisting the recent regulations not because head masters will find them irksome to themselves, hut because they know that their enforcement will gravely impair the efficiency of their schools. They ask that the regulations be emu oiled, and that if necessary others drafted with the assistance and co-operation of representative head teachers be substituted.

Tile statement concludes: —“The refuse.! of the Minister of Education to grant this reasonable request convinces us that he has no desire to work in a spirit of co-operation with teachers for tin? welfare of the children of Now Zealand.’’