THE TEACHING PROFESSION.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 279, 18 August 1908, Page 4

THE TEACHING PROFESSION.

In some vital particulars the system of State education in this country is very like the factory of a " sweater." The product is fair enough in both cases; in both cases the proprietor points with pride to the quantity and attractiveness of his goods; in his expansive moments he speaks with a thrill of pride in his voice. And in each case the public either, docs not know, or, knowing, strives not to remember, the conditions that prevail in the work-rooms. There is probably no feature of New Zealand society that has been discussed with more unctuous satisfaction by Ministers than our system of " free, secular and compulsory " education. The education certainly is " free, secular and compulsory "; the truant officer is a model of busy vigilancc; it is almost impossible to escape learning how to read and write, even if one escapes learning how to think; money is poured out like water in the cause of education. But the teachers who do the work are treated for tho most part as unskilled , labourers, Worthy only of wages that a good artisan would scornfully refuse. The " intelli--gent foreigner "—that useful embodiment of common-sense and justice—would" suppose from the tone in which Ministors and politicians, refer to our education system that Hie teachers were a jnuch-vftapccted castc, tho rccipicnts of rcv/arcta equal to the dignity and im-

portanee of their labours. Ho would he surprised and shocked to learn that the very reverse is the case. The shabby treatment of the teachers in the primary schools is an old story, but it is one that cannot be too often told, and it is told with great emphasis in a table, prepared by the Educational Institute, which we print to-day.

There arc 185G teachers who, even under the improved conditions promised in the Education Act Amendment Bill, will receive salaries ranging from that of a second-grade horse-driver—an official inferior in status to the engine-cleaner or the second-grade porter, and. considerably lower still than that grade of shunter who has to undergo two promotions before he can be trusted to shunt on his own initiative—to that of a sec-ond-grade painter in the railway scrvicc. There are 831 teachers, most of them married men, who, under the new scale, will be able to reflect, with such gratification as such a reflection may be assumed to cause in an educated man, entrusted with one of the highest of human duties, that they have outdistanced the second painter, and left the second porter far behind, and have reached equality with the various people lying in status between the man who ! paints the goods-shed and the man who brings the morning's mail. There are dizzier heights, of course. To do the Government justice were are no fewer than 13 per cent, of the teachers drawing salaries ranging from that of the clerk who is separated' by only eight grades from the stage at which he can be trusted with something better than copying things out of ledgers, to that of a third-grade clerk. To receive a salary larger than that paid to a third-grade clerk, a teacher must quit teaching, since the scale of salaries has an upper limit which says, in effect, that no teacher that ever was can possibly be of greater use to the State or possess greater talent than a third-grade clerk. There are other extraordinary facts revealed in this useful table which we need not assist by exposition, since they speak for themselves. The teachers, such is their unhappy plight, are grateful for even this elevation from the status of second porters and third shunters to that of first-class horse-drivers and' ninthgrade clerks. It is to be hoped that members of Parliament, fortified by this remarkablo revelation of that side of the education system which they do not talk about, will insist upon the passage of_ the Education Act Amendment Bill this year as a first measure of reform in a matter that is a discredit to the Dominion. .