CORRESPONDENCE.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue LXVIII, 25 June 1912, Page 3

CORRESPONDENCE.

SCHOOL TRUANCY CASES

(To the Editor.) —I am constrained to write to you by what appears to me to be the injustice of the methods under a hard and inhuman law recently enacted.

The Act says, I believe, that only a reasonable cause must prevent the children from attending school; but it leaves unsaid who shall judge whether a cause is reasonable or not, so I infer the Magistrate has to decide the point.. Someone ought to be responsible for the Magistrate, as he is no more or less human than the parents, and lacks that relationship to the children concerned. Why his opinion should necessarily be truer than that of the chairman of committee or of the parents is hard to see.

The mind of the Truant Inspector is clear, anyway, if not reasonable. In haranguing the local children the other day, he is said to have informed them that nothing less than the incapacity to get there was to prevent them from coming to school. However, I will deal with him in greater detail presently. One sick woman, whose husband has lost a lot of work through her sickness lately, kept the boy home for a day not long ago, and was warned that if she did so again she would be prosecuted.' It was the first day absent in twelve months.

Another poor and sick woman kept a child home to help her (and she has many), but took the precaution to get an exemption certificate. However, she was fined 18s because the Inspector made her out to be a liar by surreptitiously extracting from the children that there was some other reason for keeping them home. The Bench took the word of the children and Inspector against the word of the mother, and the exemption certificate thrown in.

Two other respectable citizens were hauled up by the instrumentality of the same- quondam poundkeeper, and they, too, had exemption certificates, and by subpoenaing the chairman of the school committee managed to escape fine. The poor woman, already spoken of, had not intuition enough to do that, so lost 18s. Nice kind of education system this! We don't summon Territorials for being absent a fentimes, but poor children who obey their parents are subjected to the above cold-blooded procedure. To my mind it is absolutely disgraceful for the Inspector, or whatever he calls himself, to bring the evidence of the children against the mother; and to obtain it in the .way he did ought to be enough to dismiss him. It is time this iniquitous law and office were pitched overboard. If that is the latest method of stimulating learning it is a poor look out for the future, and time a Royal Commission did sit, and if it sits on the Inspector all the better. If I thought it in the, interests of my child to stay home she should stay home, and as far as I was concerned that would be the end of it, and I dare not say what I would do if a truant inspector coaxed her to speak against the interests of her dad.* What is a reasonable excuse, anyway? Would The Truant Inspector, or whatever his new title is, consider it reasonable if it was a confirmation, or a wedding, or a religious service—say, on Ascension Day—for I know of trouble very recently over a service on this way* and in a school not many miles from here. Would this individual deem these causes reasonable or unreasonable? And if I differed . from him on this question of religion, or it may be health, should I be prosecuted ? What is reasonable, and who is to judge it? I take it that what is reasonable to tli3 man who can afford to subpoena witnesses is no less reasonable to the poor woman who Cannot read or write, bub can only pay fines at the demand of the Board officer.

Now I am on this schooling question I may as well say—though it probably won't be thought much of—what is my opinion of the whole system. In a word, it is soulless, heartless, inhuman, and cast-iron laws, and inflexible truant officers are very poor substitutes for real life. And the heartlessness, the soullessness, is owins to its system. Too much system, and law and organisation. If school committees controlled entirely the school in their areas the results'would be infinitely better. I know one thing: there is many a schoolmaster, and in big centres, too, who would be looking for work in less than a month if parents had direct control and expense of the school. I don't mean that individuals on the Board are soulless or heartless—they are possibly decent enough as far as that goes; but there is a hardness, a lifeless feature in the whole rvo-anisation of primary schools. Where there is an exception—and of course there are—it is due to a single personality—to, in a word, a good soul. Parents and committee, who, after the children, are, I maintain, the first in importance, have no say, don't even have an interview with the person who, perhaps for years, is to be* the living, daily example of manhood before their children. If the teaching is bad, parents and children must put up with it; there is no redress. If the teacher is "bad, and is hurting the character of I the children, the chance of redress is so remote and costly as to put it out of count: but jf the children are absent for one day the parents are prosecuted. Nice thing, this!

Of all the heartless, sillj» laws of this country this must be one of the worst. Indiscriminately breaking up the home and family unity, dragging people who are quite innocent before the magistrate —it is really abominable. It is not as if they refused to send their children to school, or that there was a large class of peoole growing up more ignorant than their fellows; there is absolutely ho reason for this unreasonable law. If there were more humanity and less system, more Christianity and less law, more soul and less body,' or board, there might be something in the educa- ] tional system of this country, but at nresent it is system and little else, and there is something radically wrong wiol'i the system. We'll have- beadles next, I suppose, and pillories and whipping pests. I shall never send a child of mine to a school where a truait inspector is likely to do things of tint sr.rt alluded to above, and there are many other reasons why I would soo.ior sen 1 my child to \ Roman CathrT-ic corvent than any State school —this brass idol j of our democratic worship, but I won't

"ive them now, for I hope to have been blunt and outspoken enough to have hurt someone sufficiently to arouse antagonism. . Polite piano wouldn't do, and so perforce I have written double-fo-tp and I shall keep what is in my mind now for battering anyone who likes to stand up for system, boards, schools or teachers, as they are. For a full find free discussion I sincerely hope will come of what I have written. W. F. STENT.

(We have no wish to prevent the discussion which our correspondent suggests; in fact, temperately written letters on the subject will be welcomed by us. But, to be acceptable, or even published as a certainty, letters should be short and free from personalities.—Ed.)