COST OF EDUCATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIV, Issue 289, 7 December 1933, Page 6

COST OF EDUCATION.

MAINTENANCE OF HOSTELS.

(To tha Editor.)

The Hon. C. J. Carrington has deserved well of his country, in collating and tabling in the Legislative Council figures as to the per capita cost of the State school hostels in New Zealand. It is staggering that such extravagance was ever perpetrated. Anyone who knows anything of this subject can see at a glance that to provide hostel accommodation for 500 boys and girls at a cost of £259,320 is grass extravagance. The people responsible should be treated as managers of any business who had such a record of business inefficiency would be treated in the ordinary business world. In three of the hostels each pupil in residence during 1932 represented a capital expenditure of more tnan f 1000. One wonders when sensible citizens are going to take steps to stop such folly! And this is not the only instance of educational extravagance. While little children are compelled to lose a year of their primary school life and higher education in the University is steadily starved, the country allows a system of secondary education to continue by which rich men force poor men to help to pay for the education of the children of the rich. No right-thinking people will want to stop the able child of poor parents from being educated at the public expense, but New Zealand refuses to follow England in insisting that those who are well able to pay for the secondary education of their children should do so on a sliding scale, according to their income. In this matter, England is definitely ahead of us. There a sliding scale is established and the amount payable is settled by the income and the number of children of school age of the parents.. People seem ready enough to enforce a means test on the poor, but what about a means test for the rich in this matter? I heard of a case of a man with an income of £1500 a year, who sent his daughters to a State dental clinic and of a professional man, with an income of about £3000 per annum, who gloried in the fact that he paid nothing for the secondary education of his sons. I also came across a wellauthenticated story of a man of slender means inquiring of a rich man, whose son was being educated at the public expense, as to how the boy was getting on and giving as the reason for his anxiety the fact that he was helping to educate him and -was anxious that his small resources should be well spent. When are our legislators going to begin to be honest in this matter? When are we going to revolt against' the servile State, which trains citizens of unequal financial status to help themselves to equal portions of the State's resources? JUSTICE, NOT CHARITY.