SCHOOL ATTENDANCES

Otago Daily Times, Issue 24408, 20 September 1940, Page 4

SCHOOL ATTENDANCES

Every year, the Education Board was told this week, the number of pupils attending the primary schools in the educational district goes down by a hundred or so. The information is of profound and disturbing significance. It is the more arresting because a decline in school attendance is not peculiar to Otago. It serves to emphasise the tendency towards the danger of eventual racesuicide in the Dominion. The warnings that have from time to time been issued concerning the peril to which a restricted birth-rate exposes this country have been more or less ignored. In the past ten years the population of New Zealand increased by only 115,000, which is equal to 8 per cent., and at that

rate it would not be until about 1975 that it would reach 2,000,000. But it is hardly likely that there will be any material improvement—for at any rate a year or two—in the rate of increase of the past decade. One reason for the existence of doubt on the point is provided by the war and by the absence overseas of a large number of males of the reproductive age groups. Coincidently, moreover, with the slow growth of population as a whole is the increasing disparity between the numbers comprised in the different agegroups. There has been a steady diminution in the proportion of persons of 40 years and under to the total population, and the proportion of. persons of 65 years of age and over has been steadily increasing. The effect of the change in the age-constitution of the population upon the maintenance of the social structure that has been erected in the Dominion need not be discussed here, but the implications should be sufficiently obvious. The issue which a consideration of the population figures inevitably raises is one of graver, importance, for it is not whether the country can continue to provide the benefits which it gives and to meet the debts which it has incurred, but whether it can preserve its independent existence. Nothing whatever is to be gained by blinking this question. New Zealand is one of the standing examples, quoted by foreign commentators, of a country which is under-populated and imperfectly developed. We cannot shut our eyes persistently to the fact that this constitutes a challenge to the virile peoples of densely-crowded lands. Our population is growing so slowly that it may be said to be virtually stationary. An expansion of it is plainly desirable in the interests of national security. How such an expansion is to be obtained constitutes a problem which demands the most earnest consideration if a satisfactory solution of it is to be effected.