THOSE TRUANT SCHOOLBOYS. Committeemen and Teachers as Police.

Free Lance, Volume III, Issue 113, 30 August 1902, Page 8

THOSE TRUANT SCHOOLBOYS. Committeemen and Teachers as Police.

THE Minister for Education wants to give the members of Education Boards a little exercise and a good deal of relaxation from the cares of business. Thib he demonstrated on Tuesday night when a deputation of various school committeemen waited on him to place some grievances before him. Among the utterances of the Minister that on the subject of truancy cases will probably arrest the most attention Yo i remember, of course, that Mr. Varnham who used to see as far as possible that the coming men went to school with reas onable frequency was lately taken from the "field" and put to clerical duties. * * * You will see at once that the members of the various committees in the Wellington district have heaps of time and plenty of opportunity of dealing with the boy who "plays the wag," vice Mr. Varnham promoted. The Minister believed that every school committeeman "should be a policeman" to run in the small scamp who would rather not be educated, and he asked them to accept a contract the magnitude of which had surely not struck him. Now, is there any boy who would allow a committeeman to "run him in" while there was a culvert, a drain, a bunch of scrub or a blade of grass to hide behind ; or is there any Sherlock Holmes of them all who could remember the more or less smudgy faces of five or six hundred children that belong to a particular school ? * * * It has been stated when the Truant Officer was called away to do some other work that the headmasters and teachers should take up his work. This is a most delightful suggestion. We expect it was intended that the staff of a school should be detailed one by one in rotation to scour the country for boys whose parents fondly thought they were hard at work at school. Is it considered that the time of the teachers is of so little value that it is cheaper to do without a truant officer than to require a qualified teacher to do police work ? * * * Of course the defaulting youngsters might be gathered in by correspondence addressed to the parents, but it is a little unfair to say the least to ask either teachers or committeemen to undertake the contract. Every schoolboy knows a committeeman or a teacher, but every committeeman and teacher doesn't know every child. The parents don't pay in the ordinary way for the education of their offspring ; consequently, they don't value it as much as they piobably would if it cost them a weekly sum. Correspondence or visits from teachers who ought to be in school, or from committeemen who ought to be hard at woik in the city, won't stir people up to a sense of their duty so effectually as a truant inspector's visit would. Every boy is fish that comes to the Inspector's net, but a teacher of one school is not likely to worry about someone else's tiuant. Admitting that committees have too little money to carry on their work, it is hard that they should be asked to take on a still heavier burden at the old rates, or that they should act as unpaid police. Surely if the work in the Education Department was heavy enough to make it necessary to transplant the Inspector, the cases of truancy are frequent enough to warrant the commissioning of a successor in the '' field ?"