The Manawatu Times. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1877.

Manawatu Times, Volume II, Issue 9, 8 September 1877, Page 2

The Manawatu Times. SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 1877.

TnE " Study of Economics " is the title of a pamphlet that is now being disseminated over the colony. It is professedly the prospectus of au association organised in the colony for the purpose of grafting the study of ways and means upon primary education. For the purpose of giving such study a practical bearing at the outset, the association propose that penny savings banks be established in every school where the science of economics is taught. Some twelve months ago the association, distributed copies of a pamphlet shewing the effects of the system in the Belgic schools, where it has been in operation for over eleven years. The statistics are so far satisfactory as to favor a trial of economics as an element of education throughout the schools of the colony. If we can rise sufficiently above our conserva-i tism to innovate at all this innovation, in the broad light of reason and experience, claims for itself the character of a progressive movement and invites our acceptance. The pamphlet now before us adequately sets forth the advantages to be derived from making the practical and theoretical study of economy a part of the routine of the common dayschool. The scheme appears to us specious, and the objections to it answerable. There ea7i be no doubt that the habits of childhood may have a life - long existence. Pernicious habits thai are formed and remain unchecked in a child during his tender years are very likely to keep pace with his growth, and prove disastrous to his manhood. There fs something in common between habit and the rata tree, familiar to our forests. This tree comes first as a tender vine, and clings to the trunk of some forest tree. Its tendrils are so pliant that they may be trained or twhied in any direction, but as there is no external directing influence, they grow closer and stronger, until, like rigid bauds of iron, they clasp around the stately tree that supports them, and eventually pervade its substance and destroy its original nature. Just so do pernicious habits operate. During childhood they; are amenable to the influence of tuition ; but if. they are allowed to go 'on until the age of maturity, it is seldom that any force intervenes sufficiently great to pluck them away. They become stronger than the person to whom they cling, and he becomes, as it were, moulded into a character other than his own. If this analogy is granted, there is at once furnished the strongest of all reasons for using every means calculated to encourage good and repress bad habits dui'ing childhood. A systematic training for this special purpose is a thing to be desired in every public school, The association aspire to perform a part of this laudable work.. They propose to engender habits of thrift among school children; to indoctrinate them as to those uses and effects of money that are ulterior to immediate gratifications; to make them recognise and calculate upon poverty and degradation as the -natural results of waste and improvidence. To the refleeting mind it will appear thrcfc improvidence is the great root evil of the day : it is the parent of- poverty, and- intemperance is one of its phases. It is responsible for evils that arise from a misuse of time, money, and energy, for such misuse is improvidence- Now, it is m>t hard to trace this potent evil to its small beginning. It exists- in our adult community as a deplorable reality that produces a wide-spread ruin. It exists among our. infants as a matter of no import whatever ; yet there can be jno doubt that the difference between the latter and the former is only the difference between the seed- and the- plant— the rata vine

and the rat a tree. Few are able to see in the heedless spendthrift pr - pensities of the child the diminutive cloud that may hereafter shadow its life in penury, or worse than penury. Yet there can be no doubt that in this matter the child is father to the man. Presumably, the thriftless housewife who mismanages her house and the debauchee whose self-grati-fications ruin his family are but the natural growth of children who, as children, were never taught to weigh the future against the present, or to exercise self-control or self-denial in the ordering of their little concerns, The value of education in lessening the sum of human misery is becoming every day more clearly recognised. Philanthropists and moralists set it up as a high and broad barrier against vice; and while stringent laws designed to- repress the evils of our nature are passing from the statute books, their" work is adequately performed by more perfect systems of education- Yet, efficient as the education of to-day is as an informer, expander, and strengthener of the mind, iro part "of it is directly moral, and consequently education is not doing what it is capable of doing as a corrector of vice. The Association are now leading the way to a reform in this respect. They are trying to introduce into elementary education a study that has an important moral bearing, and which, if they succeed in making general, will assuredly bear its pleasant fruit of sobriety and happiness in the' community. But unless oar philanthropists join their efforts in this or some sueh way to repress the evil of improvidence during its infantile growth, it iniist through all time continue to scatter through the world its real-life pictures of degradation and shame.