SELF-RELIANCE.

Taranaki Daily News, 21 December 1915, Page 3

SELF-RELIANCE.

SCHOOLS AND THE STATE, SUGGESTIONS BY THE EDUCATION MINISTER. Wellington, Dec. 16. "The other day I was shown over a school in a country town —a fine new ibrick building of the kind that hundreds of districts throughout the Dominion would be glad to possess,'' said the Minister for Education to a New Zealand Times representative, in the course of discussion regarding some phases of educational work. "I congratulated the school authorities on having secured such a building for the use of their children. They replied that the school was a good one, 'but stated that they were in need of an additional vote of £2O or so from the Department to cover the cost of calcimining the interior. "The incident provided a text for the sort of homily I would like to have read in a number of our schools. The Education Department, particularly in war time, is not going to make a grant of £2O for the interior finishing of that school building while there are districts that have not got schools at all, and other districts that have to be content with old wooden buildings, often small and inconvenient. I want to see more of the spirit of self-help in our schools. We should be raising boys who can whitewash a wall, repair a window, or nail down a loose board. Surely the people in every district should take a personal pride in the school where their children are being e'ducated, and not regard it in an abstracted way as the concern of some authority in Wellington. "When I say this I am not suggesting that there are no signs of self-reliance jn our schools. On the contrary, I have found many schools where a great deal has been done by the teachers, children and parents without any attempt to make the Education Department pay for everything. I have seen schools where asphalting has been done by the boys, where swimming baths have been excavated by the scholars and volunteer workers, where gardens have been created x under the most unpromising conditions by the labor of many youthful hands, and where the interiors have been improved and decorated. Those are schools of which the districts can be proud, and there can be no doubt that the spirit they reflect will make its impress upon the minds and the characters of the children. "I hope to see the day when local effort and local pride in connection with the education system will find expression in the endowment of our primary ■ehools by the people who have money to spare. In other countries, notably in America, the wealthy classes have assisted primary education enormously, by legacies and by direct gifts. But in this country benefactions of that kind, with scarcely an exception, have been confined to the higher branches of education, in spite of the fact that th'e primary schools represent the whole of the education system to the. majority of the children. No man could erect a nobler monument to himself than ar; endowed primary school, and no man could give money to i'netter advantage than by helping some school to improve the facilities that it offers the children.! "I would just add thai: it is a disastrous thing if we create in the minds n? oiir children a notion that manual labor i-i: beneath their dignity or outside their I sphere. That there is a danger in that J direction will not be denied by anybody,! and one of the ways to avoid it is tnj cultivate a feeling that, the schools must j do some things for themselves."