CAMEOS FROM THE CLASSICS.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXIX, Issue 3768, 18 June 1907, Page 2

CAMEOS FROM THE CLASSICS.

Hkkk is a fable. Once upon a time the door of a barn belonging to a farmer blew down. The rain got in and began to damage his hay. The man immediately went out and mended the hencoop. Then he went to sleep knowing that his hay couldn’t get wet any more. He had a relative who was suffering from a cough. This relative rode as hard as he could to the doctor and had his leg cut off. He wanted to cure his cough. He went home quite satisfied. Not so very long ago the Education Department of New Zealand had numerous applications from teachers to mend their schoolhouse roofs. The Education Department ordered a gross of seal-ing-wax and felt that it had done its duty. Not long since the cry of the bogged child who had no way of getting to school was heard in the land. The Education Department acted with that vigour for which it is so highly esteemed. It ordered some new stationery. Years ago a dozen educational bodies protested with all their might at the payment of teachers salaries on the gambling principle—the more children attending, the greater the salary and vice-versa. The Department saw at once that something should be done. They raised the salaries of some of the clerks in the headquarters offices. Wherever there is a reform needed, depend upon it the Education Department-will effect some other reform quite promptly. It is not customary or expedient or at all like the Department to do what if is asked. It is “a terror” for theorising. The Department has at last made a desperate attempt to mend the leaks in the roofs, buy firewood, supply conveyances for backblocks’ children, raise teachers’ salaries, abolish SchoolCommittees and the payment of salaries on the average attendance —by publishing ‘‘The School Journal.” The attempt to cope with the educational problem pe-i the School Journal is pretty much like the attempt of an unsober person to dry the Manawatu River with a piece of blottingpaper. The case of a bush schoolteacher—a girl—who had to live in a leaky raupo whare by herself, and was frightened to go home after school on winter nights, came before a Board the other day. It hasn’t yet transpired whether the girl is still living in the leaky whare or whether she has given up living. We mention this just by way of introduction to the already much-made remark that the editor of the School Journal is getting Z)4°° a Y ear f° r producing the said Journal once a month. You see the Educational Department can’t afford to allow a teacher to live in decency, but it can afford to allow a scholar a year to do what the ordinary junior reporter of a city paper would do in a week for £1 75 a year. And the boy reporter would be asked to write something of his own sometimes. He wouldn’t have to wield the paste-pot all the time. Maybe the sweet story of the ancient fictitious babies who were suckled by a she-wolf is the sort of thing to enlarge the minds of children in the Third and Fourth standards. But that is really not the point. The Government Printery turns out about 32,000 of each of the three sections of the journal once a month, and, as knowing something of the printing business, we should say that the bill for the production of the paper including editor and staff, would mend quite a number of holes in school roofs and residences, give the drowned girl in the whare a new umbrella, and otherwise advance the cause of education. In the meantime, the Government wants several hundred male teachers whom it cannot get, because it likes to give the eight pounds a week to a gentleman who has knocked off teaching to clip the more or less classics Books containing almost anything the new Journal has up to now printed, can be obtained at very low prices nowadays. But the Minister of Education is satisfied. And once more we protest with all our might at the inclusion of any weeping, wailing, dank, moss grown alleged ‘ ‘ poetry ’ ’ in schoolbooks or school papers. The man who has the effrontery to clip a weary versified wail about “ The Soldiers Grave ” with the intention of feeding the intellects of children of eight, nine, or ten years of age, ought to be sent to do picquet duty on a damp grave with treacle trickling down his devoted neck. We should teach kiddies of New Zealand the way to EIVF. No one needs teaching how to die. It comes naturallv to all.