THISTLEDOWN.

Te Aroha News, Volume XI, Issue 1748, 6 July 1895, Page 2

THISTLEDOWN.

“A man may jest and tell the truth.” —Horace.

. Mrs Aldis is again happy with a grievance. The fifth and sixth standards in the Auckland schools are drilled with wooden guns. Col. Goring wants them out one afternoon a fortnight for drill, and hopes thereby to do a little towards checking larrikinism. Mrs Aldis is up in arms at o nce i she of course looks upon all soldiers as licensed murderers, war as a relic of Paganism, and drill as one of the marks of the beast. She would suppress both larrikinism and war by preaching, and herself!, practicing, the doctrines of the sermon on the Mount, ‘ Whosoever shall smite thee on the right ch jek, turn to him the other also.' Logically this would do away with policemen and Courts of justice, as well as soldiers and war. But it is'only through the efficiency of our police and courts that we are able to approximate to this exalted standard in private life, and the very slight recognition accorded it in the relations of nations is due only to the fear of war. A yarn told of Bishop Selwyn gives, as appears to me, the most practical commentary on the text in question which I have ever heard. The Bishop, as is well-known, was highly unpopular with the war-party for his strenuous advocacy of native rights, and a war champion meeting him one day after some abuse of his conduct, struck him, ‘ My religion tells me,’ said the Bishop, * if I am struck on one cheek to offer the other.’ Again he was struck, ‘Now that I have done my duty as a Christian, I shall remember my duty as a mau,’ and the prelate gave the bully a thorough-good hiding. If nations followed our Saviour’s precept liberally, the Turk would be tbe ruler of world, and Mrs Aldis would have a practical lesson in Armenian atrocities.

Master W. Smith ought to be a proud boy; for about a mouth he has engaged thd attention of the City School Committee, the Board of Education, and the Press. Kept in after school hours by Mr Worthington, headmaster of the Wellesiey-street school, by his father’s directions he refused to obey and cleared off home. On returning next day he was refused: admission .unless he apologised and promised for the future to obey the rules of the school. This he would not do and was in consequence expeled. The Committee, after some hesitation, backed up the master and so has the Board of Education, though by no means in the uncompromising way I should have liked. Every week in the Police Courts we hear parents swearing that they cannot control children of 9 or 10, and 'pretty well all authority to punish has been taken from teachers. Can we wonder then at the prevalence of larrikinism in a more less aggravated form P Caning* has been practically abolished for the tiddley-winking tickling still permitted under that name i 3 a brand on the teacher, the parents and society at large, and a laughing-stock to the children. A teacher who is worth his salt will be able to manage 99 per cent of his pupils without resort to the cane, if they but know that he can and will use it with effect in the in the hundredth case, hut when he is allowed only a gentle tit-illation, agreeable in the mriu, of the worst offenders, discipline become derided all through 'the school. Parents are far too ;ready to listen to the tales their children bring from school. In my boyhood, a lad who came home complaining of a flogging, and they could flog then, would almost certainly have got asupplementary thrashing from his father ; nowadays the father flies to the Committee or the Police Court, and the sapient justices' who have just let off a rowdy member of a street ‘push’ with a caution, .mulct the teacher in eosts if not'in fines. It is usual iA most schools for the children to clean their desks periodically, for which the teacher supplies sandpaper and diluted oxide or hydrochloric acid. I remember two girls in a school near Auckland declining to clean theirs, as mother said it would spoil their fingers for the piano. Given to the next day to clean or clear they wisely took the former .course.. Nice useful wives this pair would be for a man who could not afford to keep half-a-dozen servants.

I notice Dr Walker is leading a crusade in the City School Committee against home lessons. His main objection is a medical one, ‘ They mean too much mental strain on the children. . The physiolQgical efforts are - -shown by the poor,.njiny, thin, anaemia disposition among a lot of SiSuf.’ It may seem presumptuous ip a layman to differ from a doctor on a physiological question, but I must say that I look on the above as utter rot. We had six hours hard graft in school as against less than five as a maximum here; we did the work with precious little help or explanation from the master, whose only duty was to see that we did' it as correctly as possible. The few who had more advanced ideas on teaching, finding but little encouragement from the bulk of their pupils soon fell back as a rule into the old rut. Our noges were then kept at the grindstone from six to half-past nine in preparing work for the next day. On Dr Walker’s.theory we ought all to have been anaemia, or, to put it in English, bloodless ; yet we could have spared enough healthy blood per head to set up half-a-dozen Auckland lads. In our schools hers the greatest strain is on the children’s attention, the teacher doe 3 all the bard graft, the best scholar i 3 but an attentive, intelligent and fertile recipient. Home, work, except in rare cases, consists only of exercises, actually or virtually identical with those worked in school, and occupy only half-an-hour, an hour, or perhaps in senior classes two hours. A medical man ought to know something about logic and not confound a single antecedent with an invariable condition. The impoverished blood of the Anckland youth, if a fact, and we have heard of it from other quarters of late, may, and in. the nature of thi :gs must, be attributable to a variety of conditions of which neither home work is the least appreciable. Wj were told lately by, another doctor that it is a characteristic of the whole coast population about Auckland. Climate, sanitary conditions, look at Auckland’s deathrate, innutritious water, excessive consumption of meat, neglect of vegetables and fruit, roller flour, early puberty, are all causes which have been assigned for the defective vitality of Aucklanders, and may all be conditions co-operating in a greater or less degree to that result. For a physician to pick out one small item in the complex condition of an Auckland child's lot and on the foundation of a necessarily limited experience build up a theory that that is the : dominant factor sn his health is the height, ■ or rather lowest, depth of empiricism .■ - ' ... . . Ij&TX. 1

A labouring man picked up a bomb-in a street in Dublin, and it exploded almost im nediately, the unfortunate man being 'ilied.