CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 299, 12 May 1911, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

BANG WENT £500,000. The interesting telegram from Dunedin mentioning that nine miles of South Island railroad (Dunedin-Taieri duplication) cost about half-a-million sterling, is a further illustration of the policy of "greasing the fat sow' while the lean hog is hungry. No one quite understands why a line should be diiDlionted at enormous cost while districts which have no railroads at all arc quietly ignored. The only reason for railroads in the present state of development in tlie Dominion is for the increase of settlement. Where country is settled sparsely, a railroad immediately assists .closer settlement. The duplication in the south does not increase settlement. It merely increases convenience to people who could get along much better with a single line than the people of other parts of New Zealand can get along without any line at all. For some inscrutable reason, nine miles of duplication at a cost of half a million pounds (to be repaid:by our grandchildren) is considered of "renter national importance than the problematical Opunakc line, which would cost about £200,000, and which would be a really useful undertaking. The ''policy" of spending huge sums on unnecessary works when immense areas of hind remain locked up and settled areas are without roads of any kind is a peculiarly atrocious one. The State lately threw £335,000 worth of "straightened'' line to the Wellington-Hutt people. Nobody knows why. Settlement has not been aided along, that line, and the trains take just as long as formerly to do the journey. Grandiloquent talk about the necessity of erecting permanent public buildings does not cheer the trade of the country on, and spending money on palatial city palaces is not filling the country with settlers. Settlers arc wanted more than building, and back country roads and railwa'ys are desired before pieces of unnecessary railway.

SCHOOLS OF THE FUTURE. Mo-t educationists who are not incurably wedded to the system of pouring the same quantity and quality of pabulum into the "little pitchers," agree that a time must come when individual children must receive individual treatment, and school life be made less irksome. Under the auspices of the London Musical and Dramatic Association. Air. Bernard Shaw recently made some interesting and characteristic remarks. The gathering was almost wholly composed of teachers. Among other things/the iconoclastic dramatist, author and lecturer, said: "One of the causes of that intense detestation of religion which is characteristic of the Emilish people in all classes is really, 1 believe, that it has been made a school -subject. School is to-day just like it was when I was a boy. Prisons never (liffer. The. time may come when schools as we know them will be entirely done away with. They will be schools' in the sense that a theatre i.s a school. In a theatre von can do what vou like. You can walk out if you are bored. The school of the future will be like that. A school book at present is a book which no person would read if he were not forced to. A man who had had Shakespeare forced on him as a school subject was the man who went to musical comedies. One found in the Bible, as in all great works of literary art, the stringing together of a number of names. In the Iliad of Homer and in Victor Hugo there were also long srenealogical lists. They were something like a post office directory, and the child's time was wasted by learning all those names. It would be better if the child learned off by heart the addresses of the post office directory as far as Adelphi Terrace. That might be useful. At present the Bible was made an instrument of torture. I picture the children of the future as being children with very much liberty, with recognised rights exactly as adult people. But I picture the community as saying to a child, 'Your liberty must be very considerably restricted until you learn to read.' The State will allow the child of the future pocket money. There in nothing more ridiculous than the present state of thiwrs. Ynu give old people of over 70. who do not matter, 5s a week, while the great majority of children have no pocket money. But the State will refuse to give a child pocket money until he knows the multiplication tables] so that he may be able to give change."