The Press Friday, June 22, 1928. The Education Department.

Press, Volume LXIV, Issue 19343, 22 June 1928, Page 8

The Press Friday, June 22, 1928. The Education Department.

We printed yesterday an account of a dispute between the Wellington Education Board and the Department of Education which may, if the public are not awakened to the position, and if the facts are as they seem to be, result in a radical and very undesirable change in the relations between the Department and Education Boards all over the Dominion. It will be remembered that the Wellington Education Board some time ago selected Mr E. K. Lomas, who has long been ActingPrincipal, to fill the vacant position of Principal of the Wellington Training College, and that the Department refused to ratify the appointment and requested the Board to advertise the vacancy again. This the Board declined to do, and the Minister now proposes to issue an Order-in-Council compelling Education Boards to advertise every vacancy on Training College staffs and to submit to him, in order of preference, the names of the three applicants they consider best qualified to fill the position, together with the names of all the other applicants. If the Minister does not approve any of the chosen three, the Board must either appoint the applicant selected by the Minister from the whole list or advertise the vacancy again; and if it fails to make an appointment in what the Minister considers a reasonable time, then the Minister is empowered to make the appointment himself. Finally, the Order-in-Council is to be antedated to cover the present dispute. On the face of it, the Department's whole course of action seems thoroughly undignified and unprincipled. In the first place the Department is apparently going to use a squabble with the Wellington Education Board in order to give further effect to its notorious hankering after centralisation. The elaborate scheme to be embodied in the proposed Order-in-Coun- , oil is so much verbiage; the Minister might just as well announce at once I that he alone will make appointments to Training College staffs, whether Boards like it or do not, since they will no longer have any real power of choice. Last year a tentative suggestion! by the Department that it would be better to abolish Education Boards was dropped hastily when it aroused general opposition, and it is the Department's own fault if most people suppose that what it is now trying to do is to achieve'the same result by a different method. In the second place, the Department proposes to put through a contentious measure by the vicious system, against 1 which Thh Press has repeatedly protested, of legislation by Regulation. Orders-in-Council are intended for use in times of emergency or. for administrative purposes.; they are not a means of conferring legislative power on a bureaucracy, and it is iniquitous to use them for such "purpose. The draft Regulation whi3 the Minister is apparently brandishing in the face of the Wellington Education Board, embodies a vital alteration in our education machinery, and should be submitted to Parliament as an amendment to the Act. Finally, the Minister seems to have hit upon the plan of ante-dating the Regulation so that he can score off his opponents—a miserable trick, if it has actually been employed, to which no Minister should stoop.