New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXXI, Issue 4897, 1 December 1876, Page 2

New Zealand Times. (PUBLISHED DAILY.) FRIDAY, DECEMBER 1.

Compulsory education has been for five years legalised in Great Britain, and it has proved a subject of considerable discussion in the colonies. The Sydney Morning Herald has frequently turned its attention to this question, and in a recent issue discusses the results of five years compulsory education in the Mother Country. Those results were made apparent in a discussion at the last meeting of the British Association, a paper on the subject having been read by Dr, Jack, formerly one of her Majesty’s inspectors of schools. The whole tendency of the paper and the discussion went to show that where compulsion was carried out in a moderate manner its results were highly satisfactory. It seems that 46 per cent, of ’the whole population and 82 per cent.

of the borough population of England have adopted compulsion. In Manchester it has been carried out with great strictness, but the results compare most unfavorably with those of towns where the law has been merely put into operation as a last resource, and as is remarked, “It cannot be denied that compulsion is worked in many of the towns in England with extreme rigor and with great i friction. It is said that in i London 115 people are fined every week for neglect--in« the education of their children.' The cost of the machinery for doing this for a half-year is £11,260, or Is. 6d. per head per annum on the average attendance secured. The bitterness which extreme compulsion creates , among: the,, lower, classes is a more matter than that of the expense it entails.” In England the compulsory system is not universal, in Scotland it is. But, as will be seen, in England its enforcement is very frequently , carried out harshly, whereas in Scotland every effort is made to render its. enforcement as little attended by what the ignorant might take for oppression as possible. As a consequence, fifty-one persons have been prosecuted by the, Glasgow Education Board during a period of three years as contrasted with 7515 persons prosecuted in Brminwham, where the system has been carried out with the utmost strictness; yet though in Birmingham the increase in the average of school attendance has been 150 per cent., Glasgow? shows even more favorable general results, and has also the high percentage of average attendance to names on the school roll of 78 per cent. Of the results attained at Birmingham, Dr. Jack says, “These magnificent results will make the record of the first two school boards of Birmingham memorable in f the education annals of England.” Nevertheless, we are inclined to conclude with out Sydney contemporary, that in education, as in other things, the severity of the means used partially defeats its own ends. Nowhere has the compulsory law been more zealously worked than at Manchester, hut the school attendance in that city is far less satisfactory than in cities where the machinery of compulsion has been worked with less severity. At Glasgow everything is done to avoid extreme compulsion. Moral suasion is always used as the first resort, and the law is kept in the back ground, to be used only when everything else has failed. One part of the work of the Glasgow School Board has been to hold meetings with‘defaulting parents for the purpose of inducing them to send their children ’to school by the pressure of reason rather than by that of; law. The result of this mode of procedure is, that education is not associated with severity and terror in the minds of the lower’classes, that prosecutions are ■reduced to the smallest minimum, and that •education itself becomes an unequivocal success. 1