EDUCATIONAL EXHIBITS.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 285, 2 December 1925, Page 8

EDUCATIONAL EXHIBITS.

(To the Editor.) Sir, —In your issue of 21st insf. there appears an article relating to the increased attendance at the schools in the Auckland province, illustrated by a graph prepared by the secretary of "tho Auckland Education Board. At the last meeting of ft this board it was decided that the graph should be sent to Dunedin for exhibition in the Education Court. This suggestion drew from the chairman of the Otago Education Board the remark that it was a gross impertinence to talk of sending the graph for exhibition. You appear to assume from that remark that the reason was that the graph showed Otago up in a bad light. This is not so; we do not grudge you your increase; on the contrary, we are glad to see the school population increasing. Tlie real reason is this: The Auckland Education Board, which is the largest and the wealthiest in the Dominion, has the unenviable distinction of being the only one of the large education boards which refused to contribute towards the cost of the Education Court, and the only exhibits from the Auckland primary schools came from two small country schools, and both of these acted on their own initiative in sending their exhibits along. The apathy displayed by Auckland business men towards the New Zealand and South Seas (not Dunedin) Exhibition seems to have communicated itself to the authorities in charge of primary education in Auckland, as there does not seem to have been the slightest effort made by the board, the inspectors, or the teachers to have the work of the scholars represented at the Exhibition, with the result that they have been deprived of the opportunity of competing against or having their work compared with that of the pupils of other provinces. The Auckland Board boasts that it lias upwards of 60,000 children on the school rolls in its district, yet it is represented by the work of about twenty or thirty pupils. There is a far larger and more comprehensive exhibit from tho school at Niue (Savage Island) than there is from the whole of the schools in tho Auckland province. It looks aa if there has been blundering somewhere. It is certainly Auckland's loss.—l am, etc., '■" Dunedin. 1. SANDERSON.