STATE EDUCATION.

Manawatu Standard, Volume X, Issue 1492, 28 October 1885, Page 2

STATE EDUCATION.

Mr Farnkix, Minister of Lands (New South Wales), thinks public education overdone with very dangerous results. " Oui Young people," he says, " think it degrading to labour. The aim of every young woman is to marry someone who will be able to keep her m affluence. The object of the young men is to pass the Civil Service examination iv order to obtain employment under Government. They have no desire to till the soil." Another writer states that a barmaid even scouted the idea of marrying a man who would expect her to cook his food and wash his linen. The man who deliberately turns his back upon a well-paid handicraft as the healthy tilling of the soil to accept an ill-paid clerkship puts aside most of his chances of rising m the world, and limits his own power of earning a good living. A writer m a Melbourne paper commenting on this state of things, says that the largest part of the laud ib actually unreclaimed ; the largest part of the population is still housed m makeshift habitations, and many of the necessaries of life are still imported from Europe. Instead of applying themselves perseveriugly to redress this state of- things, our young men set themselves steadily to work to press themselves m the ranks of distributors instead of producers. A skilled artisan and an industrious laborer is one of the most valuable of citizens, free and independent, whilst a clerk of any sort is merely an aid to those distributing forces which all endeavour to simplify and limit.