Back To School

New Zealand Listener, Volume 2, Issue 34, 16 February 1940, Page 12

Back To School

T was an accident that the celebration of Waitangi coincided with the return of a quarter of a million children to school. There was nothing in the nature of things to make the chiefs more ready to sign in February than in March, April, or May, nor is there any unassailable reason why our school year should begin by the calendar and not by the weather. But it was not an accident, as we pointed out last week, that Waitangi was one celebration all over the Dominion. That was a miracle, and, unlike most miracles, it goes on. To begin with, every speech at Waitangi and every cheer, every word, and almost every sound, was not merely heard at the time, but preserved for all time. We can’t recover Hobson’s voice, or Hone Heke’s, but it is as easy to preserve the voices of those who are making our history to-day as it is to preserve their portraits, and far easier than it is to preserve their clothes. Dried heads, a hundred years ago, were worth more even than muskets. To-day they are priceless. But pickled speeches will be selling soon in the sixpenny stores. And just as it was a miracle and not an accident that their parents were at Waitangi without going there, it is a fact and not a fairy tale that a hundred thousand schoolchildren this year will live through our first hundred years without knowing it. Ten years ago that would have been impossible, however full of knowledge and zeal their teachers might have been. It is not merely possible to-day, but unavoidable, since every second school in the Dominion has a receiving set, and slightly more than half the pupils in attendance will hear special programmes covering the lives and achievements of the men and women who have made New Zealand what it is. Grown-ups will, in fact, have to stay grown up this year, and stay awake, or they will find themselves embarrassed by ghosts at the breakfast table — James Busby and Henry Williams, John Gully and Charles Heaphy, Captain Stanley, Alfred Domett, Baron de Thierry, Wiremu Tamehana, and a host of others. They will not only have to buy more history-books than they have ever had before — they will have to read them, and be ready to be cross-questioned about them,