The Press FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1948. Post-Primary Schools Administration

Press, Volume LXXXIV, Issue 25662, 26 November 1948, Page 6

The Press FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 1948. Post-Primary Schools Administration

As was anticipated some days ago, the Education Amendment Bill, which had been again referred to the Education Committee, has been reported back to the House of Representatives with a quite new set of provisions to reorganise the administration of post-primary schools in Christchurch. They have two merits, one clear, one hypothetical. The obvious merit is that the Christchurch Technical College is brought within the system. If it is a sound aim to break down the bulkheads that have too closely , compartmented the educational house, and still do. it is an administrative as well as an academic and a professional aim. The argument can only gain force if, as there is good reason to believe, technological institutes are established and one of them, in Christchurch, takes over and develops some of the present functions of the Christchurch Technical College. The hypothetical merit of the new provisions arises from their being very much worse than the bad ones they displace. The House is more likely to react determinedly against the new clauses than the old; the Minister of Education cannot be believed to be frivolous enough to give the whirligig one more twist and bring the old clauses back again; there is no way of amending the new ones; and it is possible, therefore, to hope that the Minister will be impelled to drop the business for the present. The hope rests, of course, on the reasonable belief that members will dislike and distrust the proposal to settle by regulation the constitution and mode of appointment of six school boards. The bill, as now revised, settles the constitution and mode of appointment of only the seventh, superior body. Even supporters of the Government, who have no sturdy objection to leaving the problems of legislation to the regulation-makers, may look anxiously at a proposal to write a blank authority of this kind and scope for the regulation-makers of the Education Department. It would be an authority, not to deal with questions of detail, but to make fundamental innovations; and if Parliament will swallow that it will swallow anything. Not that this is the only objection to the new plan, or the only heavy one. It is an equally heavy objection, of a quite different sort, that the new provisions narrow the normal and *proper functions of a school board. It is useless to talk of devising such separate boards, each on the model most appropriate to its own school, when their responsibility is to be lessened. Cut away responsibility and it is a waste of time to tack oh elegant constitutional variations.