The Evening Star FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1926. WORK OUTSIDE SCHOOL.

Evening Star, Issue 19387, 22 October 1926, Page 6

The Evening Star FRIDAY, OCTOBER 22, 1926. WORK OUTSIDE SCHOOL.

Yesterday the Otago Education Board discussed a topic which crops up periodically in such bodies and sometimes in Parliament. Mr Ryan, the board’s attendance officer, furnished a report, in which ho drew attention to the fact that the education, and in some cases the physical well-being, of a by no moans negligible proportion of schoolboys are being prejudiced by work out of school hours. The occupations almost entirely responsible for this diversion of youthful energy and time are, as every observant person knows, the distribution of newspapers and of milk. It is a very difficult thing to dogmatise On this matter. The early introduction to commerce, if one may so term it, is no new thing, and has always been regarded as having very positive benefits as well as very obvious dangers. According to the report presented there are in the schools in and around Dunedin about 350 boys who perform such duties before or after school. That is to say their number is such as would fill one of our average-sized schools. If it were possible it would be interesting to trace the after-careers of these lads and see how they compared with those of their less enterprising or more leisured classmates. To the casual observer they appear to possess at least the average youthful zest, and perhaps more than the average initiative and self-confidence. But casual observation should not bo accepted as a reliable basis. One must give duo weight to the evidence of the teachers and the board’s medical officers. Teachers have reported extra somnolence in the afternoon classes on the part of the earlyrising, hard-working fraternity, and the medical officer has expressed concern lest those who work till 10 p.m. (mostly lads vending delicacies at the theatre) should also bo burdened with home lessons. Extremely early rising, involvcd in by no means few cases in connection with milk delivery, is to some extent prejudicial to homework, for a growing lad who has been awake and about since well before dawn in the winter and with the dawn in summer is in no fit state to solve problems in arithmetic or compose original essays after the evening meal. When this was mentioned the chairman of the board remarked that, according to the newspapers, there should bo no home lessons. Wo presume ho meant that this view had been expressed by a number of parents and others who have addressed letters to the editor on this subject. Unfortunately, under the present system progress through the various standards would bo ridiculously glow if homo lessons were abandoned. In many of our schools the size of the classes is so great that one teacher cannot possibly exercise that personal supervision over tho individual work in school time which is the only method which would permit of tho elimination of home’lcssons.

The board did not adopt any drastic measures of reform, perhaps because it is not armed with the authority to put them into force. AH that it is doing is to . give full publicity to the facts, including the communication of its attitude to the Education and Health Departments, and using its influence in the discouragement of the employment of children in the early hours of the morning. One would have thought that, if the board singled out any period of extra school hour employment for condemnation, it would have been the night time. As it is, the board rather flouts the old proverb to the accompaniment of which unwilling children used to ho ushered to bed at night and aroused from bed in the morning: “ Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Furthermore, the board’s discrimination tacitly countenances the running of certain risks inseparable from the contact of children of tender years with the night life of towns. The resolution would at least have been better had' it contained no reference at all to the part of the twenty-four hours during which members objected to children being deprived of their natural rest. Though the matter of child labor of the kind complained of has not been legislated upon in New Zealand, legal restrictions exist in Britain. The law passed there in 1918 (,an amendment of an older statute) forbids any employment ,of a child under twelve years of ago, and restricts the hours in which school children over twelve years old may lie employed; they may not work before 6 a.m. or after 8 p.m. on any school day. There is, however, provision for a system of permits under which the maximum amount of work for children over twelve is one hour in the morning before school and one hour in the afternoon after school. Even this may bo stopped by the local education authority. If the school medical officer proves that the child’s physical development, health, or education is being prejudiced, the education authority may summarily end the employment or modify its conditions, and the educational authority has been equipped with power to find out all about the conditions of work from both parent and employer. There could surely bo no harm in passing similar legislation in Now Zealand. It has been attempted. In 1919 Mr Hanan moved the insertion in the Education Amendment Bill of a provision that no person shall employ any child under the ago of fourteen for purposes of gain in connection with any business, occupation, or calling save in pursuance of a permit issued under regulations to bo framed, and making offending employers and parents liable to a £5 fine. This danse was ruled irrelevant to the Bill, but Mr Hanan immediately brought the matter under the Government’s notice by moans of a question in which he incorporated facts and figures from the reports of school medical inspectors. Those wore arresting enough to warrant State interference, but it happened to be near the end of the session, and nothing was done. Nor has anything been done during the intervening seven years. The matter may not be so urgent now as it was then, due perhaps less to any arousing of the public conscience than to the substitution of the milking machine for hand milking in herds of any size. But if legislation intervenes on behalf of the industrious boys, what are the girls going to do about it? In these eays of feminine emancipation and ■ (dependence the schoolgirls would be almost false to their sex if they were to sit silent. Many of them are also early risers in the fulfilment of what suck documents as census and income tax

returns define as “domestic duties.” Yet there would be chaos in the homo if tho schoolgirl could dispute with her mother over tbo legality of a request to set the table or dry tho dishes, or if a permit had to bo obtained to enable her to give a Hhnd at the clothes lino after school. Tho law, of course, would differentiate between this and employment outside for gain. But that would not convince the girls of the equality of tho sexes in the eye of tho law.