THE BOYS' HIGH SCHOOL.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIX, Issue 14610, 18 February 1908, Page 4

THE BOYS' HIGH SCHOOL.

TO THE EDITOR. ! Sir —For many years the Boys' High , School, Christchurch, has been a, glar- ; ino- example of what high salaries will not do. "They will not ensure a good education for Tom, Dick and Harry, in whose interests I write. It IS quite true the public hears the same old tale trotted out at prize distributions and commemorations—that the school must be a first-class one because Tom got into tne First South African Contingent, Dick into the now historic Ml Black football team, while Harry is champion hundred yards for New Zealand. It is true, moreover, thai/ youths of seventeen or eighteen years, who have snent four years at this institution, without even matriculating, will assert in the most confident terms that all is well with tho school, for did not So-and-so win a junior University Scholarship But those of us parents who have boys to educate are beginning to make comparisons between the examination results at our various secondary schools. These examination results, we know, are not the only index of a school's efficiency, but if the West Christchurch District High School, with a roll of about one hundred and forty secondary pupils, taught mainly by primary school teachers, can securethe remarkable results reported in your columns! some weeks ago, that is, about fifty passes in matriculation and Civil. Service/ what might we expect the* highly paid, more highly educated staff of High School experts to accomplish with the two hundred and nine roll number of the year 19C6? Will tho Board of Governors, at its next meeting, take us into its confidence and state how many of the one hundred and twenty-one boys between the ages of fifteen and twenty attained the matriculation or even Junior Civil Service standard? We, as interested parents, want to know what the eleven regular and five part-time teachers accomplished outside of cricket, foctball and rifle-shoot-ing. We approach with bare heads, for we remember that when Dunedin

wnd Invercargill, with a true ScotcK practical love of education, flung wide their high school doors to the Solders of proficiency Standard VI. certificates, and made room for What the Dunedin rector said was the finest lot of boy* he had ever, had, our Christchurch Board couldn't, and wouldn't, and didn't, and the local District High School was the result. If, the Board is "hoist with its own petard," if "comparisons are odious," the responsibility still lies on the shoulders of the local Board of Governors, and in justice to the large number of present and future parents of Boys' High School pupils, we ask for the returns for the lasj year or two.—-I am, etc., HODGE.