The School Age

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21709, 17 February 1936, Page 10

The School Age

It is, perhaps, as the president of the Board of Education said in the House of Commons, " rather a wonderful thing " that the Education Bill and ite programme of reforms should be moving towards early adoption when governments in other parts of the world are discussing " rumours of wars and revolutions, regression, crises, and censorship." It would be more wonderful, however, and deplorable, if rumours of war and debates on rearmament were to absorb the attention of Parliament and postpone educational reforms or make them seem unnecessary. A good government must, after all, legislate on the assumption that the devil is not Jo have his victory and that it is worth while to go on fighing him with an ideal of life as well as with his own weapons. But Mr Oliver Stanley's pride in the bill is quite legitimate. It incorporates a plan which was announced during the general election campaign and which figured in it very prominently. This fact may cause New Zealanders to reflect a little sadly on the contrast afforded by the Dominion's general election, in which educational issues figured hardly at all; and England's having taken the lead in raising the school age, particularly, is a further reproach to a Dominion which-has just as good reasons to consider this reform and press on with it. Juvenile unemployment, though statistics are incomplete, has been a serious problem in New Zealand, and though the seriousness of it is at present less, it may increase again. But this is only one crude form of the general social argument in favour of a higher leaving age. No country can properly claim to have set a respectable minimum standard in education, when any child may be withdrawn from school at the age of 14. Yet the outcry about the school age in New Zealand has been almost entirely about the minimum age of entry, thought it is far less important (to put it no more emphatically) to begin formal education a year sooner than to carry it on a year longer. It is at the age when New Zealand's law permits education to cease that its results are being developed and confirmed. Opposition to the English bill, it will' be noted, is confined to a clause which, it is feared, may make the reform uncertain. Exemption is provided for, when the local authorities are satisfied that a child is leaving school before reaching the new minimum age in order to entsr " beneficial em- " ployment." So far as is known, this phrase is not interpreted by regulations, so that, unless any are laid down, local authorities will interpret it as they please and will do so. no doubt, very variously. What is opposed, thcrc-

fore, is not the reform, but the possibility of its benefits being lost in exemptions., But New Zealand has not yet come to the point of seeing the benefits.