School Starting Age

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 267, 6 August 1932, Page 13

School Starting Age

Sir, —It surprised me not a little to see the authority Mr. Ingram had for ins wild statement that children between five and six would suffer no harm by being excluded from the schools. May I suggest that he consult some of the reports of Sir George Newman, the great English medical authority on schools, and the report, “The Case' for Nursery Schools,” by the Education Inquiry Committee, on which Sir Percy Nunn and other educational authorities served. In the prefatory note he will find these words: “There is still a widespread unwillingness to regard the needs of children under five as constituting an educational problem at all. We believe that in the light of the modern understanding of those needs . . . this attitude of mind is demonstrably wrong. Wnat they are concerned with is the child under five; it does not seem to have entered their heads that there were “experts anywhere who were not aware of the needs of children over five, I think Mr. Ingram has done the Minister of Education an injustice by including him in his short list; I feel sure the Minister would not claim to be an expert in this field. My own recollection of the Minister’s grounds for excluding children between the ages of five and six were: (1) Economy; (u) the fact that children who went later to school were not subsequently at a disadvantage. No one doubts the truth of the second statement, but the inference drawn is quite fallacious. The error arises from too narrow a view or education. Fortunately a great deal of valuable educational work is still being done in homes where the conditions are reasonably good. It is from these homes that the children referred to in the above statement come. Unfortunately there ’are many homes in which these conditions do not exist, and this is so to a much greater extent tn times of stress like the present than in times of prosperity. There was probably never a time in the history of this country when there was a more urgent need for the schools to be open to the children b-tween five and six. With the economy argument it is more difficult to deal, because every case.Of economy raises a question of. relative values. In regard to the English situation. Mr. R. H. Tawney has written the following: “On the one hand, the answer to the question whether expenditure is or is not a burden depends on the. relative importance of the objects to which it is assigned. A nation whose income Is barely sufficient .to maintain its population may plausibly argue that it must live from hand to mouth, and has no surplus to spend on the special cultivation of the power of the rising generation. A nation which can spend 100 millions in an expedition against Russia, and 14 millions on a dock at Singapore, and 400 millions on drink, and 20 millions on the owners of land in London, and six millions on the owners of royalties, and a large, though uncertain, sum on the. recipients of monopoly profits of various kinds, may prefer not to attend to the welfare of its children, but it is stopped from arguing that it cannot afford to do so.” With a few changes in the items this seems to apply with equal force to us m New Zealand. To say we are too poor to allow these children to attend is. not to paint ourselves in very stimulating colours. To me the real fact is that this is precisely the type of expenditure that we cannot afford not to