UPPER WAKEFIELd SCHOOL COMMITTEE.

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume XIII, Issue 5, 5 January 1878, Page 2

UPPER WAKEFIELd SCHOOL COMMITTEE.

To the Editor op the « Evening Mail.' _ Sia,— lt is unfortunate]/ only too true that there are those in our district who make it their daily business to be on the constant look out for trouble, and who upon hearing that any child has been chastised, no matter how justly, will visit the parents and insist on bringing the whipping before the. Committee. Several cases hare occurred where the parents have refused indignantly to be mixed up in any such proceedings, but others on the contrary are only too ready for the mischief; but that the complaints are groundless, against the present victim at least, is patent from the fact that with all the raking up, and all the ingenuity expended in getting up these cases, on each occasion that they i have been heard by the Committee, they have been dismissed as vexatious and frivolous in the extreme. It is however, not only the masters that are worried, and harassed to an extent that people out of the district cannot conceive; but the children are also demoralised by being made spies of over their teachers, and beiug brought up as witnesses against tljem. On my way up to the Foxhill Post Office last night, I met six or seven children, as near as I could tell in the dark, from six to ten years old, who on seeing me approach sajd, '•' Who's that?" « Its Grove," said one. " You're too late, its all over," says another. He s too frightened to go," says a third. &c, &c. They were coming from what is getting to be quite a common spectacle up here, viz., children giving evidence against their teacher, and the pert manner in which they shouted out their iusolence to me was only the outcome of the parents (aided and abetted by the Committee), setting their chMdjren over and above their elders. For two years, with the same teacher in the Upper Wakefield school that we have now, we had perfect peace and quietness in school matters. The Committee was so constituted then that none of the petty trash the present Committee delight in would be listened to. •' ' ' ' There a*e some of us up here that desire to see things go on as they did during those two years, and deeply regret that pvro late residents baring left the district should have bo altered things for the wbrte.

So far from being a mere personal squabble (which I should be ashamed to trouble you with), it ia a fighj; for justice towards the teachers in our two schools, whoever they may be, and that iproper subordination of the children, so necessary for their welfare. > Yours, &c, \ " ' T '-- - : James Grove. Upper Wakefield, Jan. 3, 18 78.