The Harrowed Parent

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 555, 10 February 1950, Page 11

The Harrowed Parent

T was happy programme planning that placed F. L. Comb’s series The Schools of Sixty Years Ago right next to 2YA’s other Monday night constant Sixty Years of Song, for the contrast between them is so marked that the listener is tempted to toy with the idea of some correlation, Can ir be a fact that the more repressed the child the more carefree the parent. and that normally exuberant children have an enervating effect upon the edults of the community? Mr. Combs has now passed Standard 2 in his saga of the asceni to S.6. Slowly and inimitanly he narrates the story of his progress to ultimate Proficiency, the marchinz up and down the long columns of ligits, the patient gathering of facts, the traumata of inspectoral visits. His story is purple-patched with extracts from class Readers of the period, Father, dear Father, come home with me now, The clock on the steeple strikes one, and with his own Jacobean. turns of phrase. Yet while little voices lisped Casabianca, and little bottoms smarted ‘unjustly for inherited inaptitudes, adults

of the period let themselves go in "Ta-ra-ra boom-de-ay" and "The Belle of New York." Today when inspectors are spectres only to the profession, and A. A. Milne irradiates school journals, we sing songs like "Cool, Clear Water," "Riders in the Sky" and a dreadful thing called "Life gets Teejus, Don’t It?" Awful, ain’t it?