OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL BUILDINGS. A Few Contrasts.

Free Lance, Volume V, Issue 217, 27 August 1904, Page 6

OUR PUBLIC SCHOOL BUILDINGS. A Few Contrasts.

IF Wellington parents don t send their children to the large and various assortment of leaky death-traps the Education Depaitment by courtesy designate "schools," they aie liable to be haled before a magistrate and fined If they do send them to the said deathtraps, the Department doesn't pay funeral expenses or the doctors bill. Education is compulsory and free, and this is one of the trump caids played by all lovers of this rich and fertile country when they are expatiating on the splendour of our institutions and the beneficence of the powers that be * • • It has been proved— aaid everyone with an eye knows it is true — that the schools of Wellington and many other places are absolutely unfit for the purpose they were erected for. That the children, who are supposed to be our chief need, are packed into insanitary places, breathing impure air, taught by underpaid teachers, and with no prospect of change for the better. The child crop is a failure — so they say. We can't, or won't, look after the small crop of kiddies we have, and we want more to neglect It may be good logic, but we can't see it. * * * We have no money. The Education Boards have to do all sorts of humiliating things to raise funds— and our surplus grows at such a rate that the world locks on in envy. Imagine anyone being so insane as to propose the spending of the siirplus on housing our finest asset — the children — m proper school houses, razing the insanitary rookeries to the earth, paying the teachers a living wage, and living up to our paper reputation * # * Teachers have a grand time — lots of holidays All right, try it Stand on your feet all day, with the rain coming down the chimney, a gale blowing through the wall, and a few hunched whooping and coughing youngsters m front of you, to whom you must impait the education that is the chief gloiy of New Zealand It is worth swatting four or five years for, especially when you will be able, if you have luck, to diaw half a caipentei s wages some day * • • Take a look lound Wellington Beautiful Houses of Parliament — not foi children, though Lovely Government Printing Offices — for grown-ups Splendid Government Life Insuiance Buildings — for adults Magnificent Railway Offices — for men and women. None of those places leak, and the clerks — who are not school-teachers — don't have to wear macintoshes and erect umbrellas Take Mount Cook Barracks, for soldiers who may be wanted some day to "rough it " There are no rotten weatherboards there Prisoners can't kick a hole in the wall » ♦ * The tree-planting aristocrats of gaoldom who have weather-proof

huts, are better provided for than the school-teachers and school-child-ren of Wellington. In many places, one will find palatial railway star tion buildings and a ramshackle hut foa a school It isn't consistent with oui alleged determination to help the child-rearing industry along. If we had to stop the onward crawl of the North Island Mam Trunk snail foi a while, and spent some money in looking to things educational, w^ might ask for the adulation of parents and perhaps get it, but, above all, if we spent that enormous suiplus on education we might begin to believe there really was a surplus to spend