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E.—l

34

(c.) The present voluntary system of attendance at evening classes could be improved by effective encouragement from employers of labour, by the systematic visitation of the parents of children who are about to leave the public school, by the personal influence of the public-school teacher, by propaganda among workpeople, and by close co-operation on the part of the local authority with the managers of boys' and girls' clubs, and other voluntary agencies. ( f.) Pupils should be encouraged to attend continuation schools during the closing months of their public-school course, due precautions being taken to prevent overstrain. (g.) The committee believes that, though the present voluntary system might be much improved by the above methods, so long as the local authorities are under no obligation to provide continuation schools, so long as adolescents are under no obligation to attend them, and so long as employers are under no obligation to enable their young workpeople to attend classes at convenient hours, large numbers of young people will remain without the education they so sorely need. (h.) The committee therefore recommends that it should be the statutory duty of local authorities to make suitable provision of continuation classes from the time boys and girls leave the public school up to their seventeenth birthday, and that it should be lawful for local authorities to make by-laws for requiring the attendance at continuation classes to an age not exceeding seventeen years of any young person who is not otherwise receiving a suitable education; provided that such classes are not held more than two miles from his place of residence. (i.) Further, that it should be the statutory duty of the employer of such young person to enable him to attend continuation classes for such period of time and at such hours as may be required by the by-laws of the local authority. (j.) An employer should be forbidden by penalty to employ or continue to employ any young person who fails to produce evidence of attendance at classes in conformity with the local by-laws. (k.) The local authority should have power to fix, after consultation with representatives of the employers and of the workpeople in each trade, the hours and seasons at which the compulsory continuation classes should be held. (I.) For the planning of suitable courses the local authority should establish advisory committees, including representatives of the employers and workpeople in each calling and of persons experienced in teaching. It need scarcely be added that the opinions, deliberately expressed, of a body such as the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education demand the most careful consideration of educationists everywhere. It is true that here in New Zealand questions bearing on the education of adolescents do not, fortunately, bristle with complications and difficulties such as are met with in older lands'. It is, however, also true that under the voluntary system that obtains in New Zealand too large a number of young persons do not proceed to any school or class on the completion of their public-school course. So it seems necessary, at no far distant date, to consider the expediency of imposing some measure of compulsion designed to lessen as far as possible this undesirable discontinuity of attendance. The special grants to Education Boards for the training of teachers on subjects of manual and technical instruction have been continued this year. In one or two districts special sessions have again been held with satisfactory results. Agriculture and kindred subjects have received considerable attention in connection with these special sessions and the usual week-end classes.

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