The Times. Published on Tuesday and Friday Afternoons. Motto: Public service. FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 1920. MOVABLE SCHOOLS.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 9, Issue 557, 13 August 1920, Page 2

The Times. Published on Tuesday and Friday Afternoons. Motto: Public service. FRIDAY, AUGUST 13, 1920. MOVABLE SCHOOLS.

A suggestion of an original nature emanated from a meeting of the Franklin Sub-provincial Executive of the New Zealand Farmers' Union in the course of discussion on the proposal by the Education Department to provide movable hutments for the accommodation of schoolteachers in the backblocks. It was suggested that small portable schools should be built which could be placed in a position where the families of about half-a-dozen settlers could receive primary education up to the third standard. The idea, seemingly was tna t when the place had become populous enough to be entitled to a permanent building, the makeshift i could be taken to another backblocks neighbourhood. The policy appears to be a good one, and even if the temporary school was held in one small centre for some months and then taken to another, alternating between two places throughout the year, it would give much better conditions than now obtain in many sparsely-populated areas for the primary education of the sons and daughters of our pioneers. Too little attention is given to the needs of those engaged in bringing virgin soils into cultivation; we do not fully realize the fact that the early settlers blaze the trail, and carve out homes and form centres on which are built the towns and cities of the future. These stouthearted men and women belong to the class that has made it possible for our cities and towns to exist; they have been and still are the builders of a nation, the guarantors of a great destiny. People in populous centres complain of the lack of street lighting, paved footpaths and what-not, but little thought do they give to the sufferings of the pioneer's child, trudging miles through mud and slush to obtain a rudimentary knowledge of the three

R's, Auckland, Pukekohe, Hamilton, and all the way down to the Bluff the sites of the present centres were once swamps or wildernesses, and would be so still were it not for the like of those whom the country still begrudges an elementary educa- ' tion to tthe children of. An army of people who get a living by fashioning into various forms ,the materials won from the earth—or speculating in both the earth and materials—have a moral obligation to help sustain those who suffer the hardships of backblocks life, but who yet are extending our wealth-producing capacities. The nation as a whole should contribute substantially towards the provision of means of communication in the waybacks and the facilities for education in those rugged areas, and if the Government of the day is really serious in its protestations of sympathy witli the nation's pioneers it will deal with this matter of primary education in a liberal and effective soirit.