ILLITERATE EDUCATIONISTS.

Mt Benger Mail, Volume 17, Issue 854, 5 September 1896, Page 4

ILLITERATE EDUCATIONISTS.

Some time back Mr T. J. Macnamara, member of the London School Board, who has an intimate knowledge of the working of small school boards, declared that it was nothing short of an " abomination " that the prejudiced "illiterates" who form a good sprinkling of these small boards should administer our .educational machinery. "It is no uncommon thing," he wrote, " for members of such boards openly to declare themselves actively hostile to a generous education for the toilers. 'Oive a-doue wi'out eddycashion,*' said a chairman of a school board recently, 'an' wat on airth does 'Odge's childurn want wi' buke-larnin' ? 'Ull it lam 'um to 'oe turmuts any better ?' ' Which o' them book-learnin' men,' said another chairman of a school board, whose daily wont it was to sit from noon till 10 p.m. in the bar parlor of the village ' public'— 1 which o' them could take forty two-penn'orths like me, and get safely 'ome?'" Mr Macnamara declared that these specimens, far from being exaggerations, accurately represented the high-water mark of the intelligence of an appreciable section of the directors of locally-controlled education in England. It is of a Welsh School Board that the following story |is told:—"The members quarrelled so much one with another that an inspector of schools was sent down,' whose mission it should be to throw oil, if possible, on the troubled waters. When he entered the room, with true parochial instinct all the members and the elerk rose with one accord, and began violently to clamor forth each his own views upon the matter. During a lull the inspector ventured to suggest that it would be more convenient if the members spoke one at a time, and that he would hear the chairman first. The chairman thereupon began : 4 Well, you see, sir, we've a-had so much trouble wi' our clerk here that I ups and I writes to London ' * You're a liar,' shouted the clerk, • for you can't write!'"