OUR NATIONAL SCHOOL SYSTEM. And Mr. Hoggins' Strictures.

Free Lance, Volume II, Issue 94, 19 April 1902, Page 8

OUR NATIONAL SCHOOL SYSTEM. And Mr. Hoggins' Strictures.

THE Rev. A. li. Hoggins, M.A., seems to have a weakness for pulpit sensations. That is the impression we derive from the newspaper reports ot the sermon he delivered at St. Peter's on Sunday last. There seems to be no reason to doubt the newspaper reports either, for no one has stepped forth to call them in question. Mr. Hoggins is described as "Inspector of Schools, Canterbury," and his sermon, which was preached upon the significant text, " Feed my lambs," proved to be a very wholesale condemnation of our educational methods. ♦ * * Rather funny, on the first blush of affairs, that a man who is described as Inspector of Schools, and might therefore be presumed to be a salaried officer of the State, should be using the pulpit to denounce and set people against the very system which provides him with a billet. But the newspaper reports place Mr. Hoggins in a false light in introducing him as " Inspector ot Schools, Canterbury." Upon inquiry we learn that he is not a salaried State official, and only diocesan inspector of Anglican Sunday-schools. Having set him right in this particular, let us pass on to scan his phillipics. Mr. Hoggins is not satisfied with attacking our educational system, and saying that it is on the wrong lines altogether. He has still more alarming statements to make. He says that crime amongst us is not only increasing, but shows a startling increase Also — and this is the most audacious statement of all — that we have now 20 or 30 per cent, more crime per head than any of the older countries. Unfortunately, for the pulpit orator, facts and figures are dead against him. In the course of a lecture at Petone on Tuesday night, Chief Justice Sir Robert Stout took occasion to expose the unsubstantial character of these wild and sweeping assertions. So far from crime being on the increase, it has decreased from 88-61 per 10,000 of population in 1890, to 26-15 in 1900, a very marked decrease indeed in a single decade. • • • The Chief Justice could have gone much further than that. He could have shewn how silly and preposterous was the allegation that " we have now 20 or 30 per cent more crime per head than any of the older countries." He could have quoted from the Official Year Book the striking and impressive fact that, while at the census of 1896 the New Zealand-born formed 63 per cent ot the whole population, they contributed not more than 2.5 per cent, of the prisoners leceived in gaol. He could ha\e shewn that our people are far more temperate and law-abiding than the people of New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, and m fact there aie very few countnes, old or new, that will compare with New Zealand m point of morality. « * * Our educational s\stem is, of course far from perfect. But Mr. Hoggins wants us to believe that we are on the wvift descent to perdition, and that our school system is responsible for it. Pure fudge. At any rate, before he cries " stinking fish " so loudly let him bring forth his evidence and prove his case. Even it we were on the steep down-grade to crime, and were declining so rapidly in morality as Mi. Hoggins asserts, by what right does he saddle our national schools with the blame of it "? As a diocesan inspector of Sunday-schools he would probably wax wroth, and might even t\) into a clerical tantrum, if one were to suggest that the Sunday-schools

were responsible for this alleged backsliding to crime. Yet, in the absence of either facts or figures, one might more easily suggest that than the other thing. The truth is the publicschool system is a convenient kind of " Aunt Sally "to shy sticks at. And some parsons seem to like the exercise.