A Sensitive Department.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19213, 20 January 1928, Page 8

A Sensitive Department.

We printed yesterday morning a message from Auckland giving an account of a strange appeal by the Department of Education to the Auckland Education Board to be protected against the harsh criticism of Training College students. It appears that the Editor

of Manuka, the Auckland Training College magazine, has made a typically undergraduate attack on the Department because " students come into college expecting that at the end of "their course they will obtain a position yielding a salary of at least " £165 for a town position and up to "about £230, including all allowances, "for a sole charge school," whereas (it is asserted) the majority will get only about £145 a year. The writer also draws a harrowing picture of a young man of twenty or twenty-one trying " to keep "up the standard of living which is " expected of a teacher on less than £3 "a week." If the Department of Education feels that it is quite consistent with its dignity to enter into a controversy with the Editor of a Training College magazine, it should have no difficulty in making a very effective reply to the above complaint, though most people will see no urgent reason for replying at all. But it is surely amazing to find an apparently panic-stricken Department making the pathetic request that "the magazine " should not be allowed to comment on "the policies of the Board or the Department," and "should be subject "to the censorship of a responsible " officer." Concerning the complaint itself the Department makes the obvious but irrelevant comment that "it "was written by a teacher with a "grievance." But although most people regard the Training College system as a very generous one as far as the students are concerned, and will not waste much sympathy over a teacher of twenty-one in a town school who finds himself compelled to live on £145 a year when he expected £165, the Department should surely be able to pluck up enough courage to deal with its own students without making ignominious appeals for help to an Education Board.