HALF-TIMERS.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 13614, 24 December 1909, Page 8

HALF-TIMERS.

The remarks of the Chairman of the New Brighton School Committee at the distribution of prizes on Wednesday evening were very much to the point. According to our report, he referred in

strong terms to those parents who sent their children to school in the morning and kept them at home in the afternoon to look after the younger children. There is, of course, something to be said for the mother of a large family of small children who occasionally makes an elder child look after the babies for an afternoon. A woman who cannot afford to employ help and who is tied closely to the house day after day must occasionally feel compelled to get away from it for an hour or two. But there is some danger of the practice of making " half-timers" of echool children becoming* a fixed habit, and it should be stopped. The parents concerned cannot surely realise the full extent of the injustice that they are doing to their children by this deliberate and successful evasion of the truancy regulations. They are, in truth, "robbing the children of the educa"tional benefits that should be theirs,'' and that are available for them if they attend school regularly. The evil is not one affecting only the child as a child—if it were there would be less to say against it. for the absence from school does not hurt children physically. But it inflicts upon them a loss which they may feel during their whole life, for apart from the actual instruction that they miss by continual absence from school for part of the day, they lose the wholesome discipline of regular attendance, and come to regard their education as a matter of no consequence, that can be put on one side on the slightest excuse. The State, recognising that its citizens must be well educated if .hey are to hold their own in the world, has provided, free of cost, a. system of education that, despite some defects, is on the whole an admirable one. All that it requires in return is that parents shall, for their part, recognise the importance of a good education by sending their children to school regularly. The parents who fail to do this are neglecting their duty to their children and to the State. The practice to which attention ha_ just been drawn at New Brighton may be common in other districts; it cannot too soon bo checked if the next generation are to show the benefit of the educational opportunities now so freely and fully placed before them.