GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATORY DEPARTMENT.

Press, Volume LX, Issue 18263, 23 December 1924, Page 13

GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL PREPARATORY DEPARTMENT.

TO THE EDITOR O T "TRE FBKSS." Sir,—l am sure that there must be many parents in Canterbury who much regret that the preparatory department at the Girls' High School Las been done jtway with, and as there seems to be a movement on foot to have the question of its retention again brought before the Board of Governors, it is to be hoped that it will receivo at their hands the favourable consideration it deserves. The Girls' High School was originally founded as an undenominational school for the education of girl 3 from eight or nine years old upwards. Is it fair to depart from the intention of the founders, and to rob parents desiring it of the opportunity of placing their young daughters in a girls' school, controlled, by a lady of exceptional merit, and staffed by cultivated and experienced women teachers? Strange as it may seem to some members of the Board, there are still parents who aro not in favour of coeducation, and who are old-fashioned enough to believe that the training of adolescent girls is best entrusted to women. In most of the city and suburban primary schools boys and girls are taught in the same classes, and in the upper standards of such schools the teacher is invariably, I believe, a man. Only at the Girls' High- School can girls in the upper standards receive from a woman teacher, in wholly feminine surroundings, tho same courso o£ instruction as is given in the primary schools. I speak, too, from my own knowledge and experience when I say that the moral training girls receive at the Girls' High School is infinitely beyond what is given at most of the primary schools, where the children are taught, by sad experience, that to get their sums or their spelling wrong,. or to write badly, is a far more serious offence than is cheating or lying. Then, too, a school like the Girls' High School has traditions which even the best of thte primary schools carinot hope ever to attain to, and which are great factors in the: building up of character. Another point which should not be overlooked is tho needs of those country children living beyond- the reach of even the small sole charge schools of the district: To close the preparatory department is to deny to many of these children, the advantages of a town education; for thoughtful parents, who would willingly send their daughters to town if they could go to a wellmanaged hostel like "Acland," hesitate to do so when they must be boarded out in families where there is neither discipline nor supervision.— Yours, etc., » PARENT.