THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1888.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9023, 9 April 1888, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. MONDAY, APRIL 9, 1888.

The enormous sums of money which have been expended on school buildings in New Zealand—drawn almost wholly from the pockets of the English creditor —and the fact that such liberal borrowings and spending must soon cease, give no ordinary importance to the question as to future expenditure in this direction, and the sources from which the money should be obtained. To the elucidation of this question a very valuable contribution has been made i" a Parliamentary paper prepared under the authority of the Honorable the Minister of Education, Mr. Fisher. The facts contained in that paper will be startling to many, and though his conclusions as to the duty imposed on the public in view of further expenditure on school buildings may not commend themselves to all, the return is none the less of exceeding value. That the State has been liberal to the verge of extravagance—if not beyond it—has bean pretty generally believed j and the belief is confirmed in

the pages of this document. One extract which we . make—its . conclusions based on previous elaborate tables—speaks for itself : " There stands disclosed this startling fact: that if the provincial governments uhder their education systems had spent no money whatever upon the erection of school buildings, the Government of the colony, since the passing of the Education Act, has provided more than sufficient means to erect buildings of a lasting and durable character, in brick or stone, and sufficient in number and capacity to accommodate the largest attendance of children yet recorded in the public school history of this colony." The writer adds: "It will be asked what has been done,with this money 1 It forms no part of this analysis to furnish an answer to that question." It may be so, but the answer is readily enough supplied in the mind of every one, that owing to the irresponsible manner in which that building fund has been administered by the Education Boards, the money has been scandalously squandered. For we know that the provincial governments, instead of having "spent no money whatever upon the erection of school buildings," had in many cases made most liberal provision in the matter of ; school buildings before the abolition of the provinces and though that cannot be said of our then poor province, we are —from what we have seen of education administration in this provincial district since that timeconfirmed in the belief that this fund has been most shamefully wasted everywhere. The force of Mr. Fisher's implication is seen on reference to his figures. It appears that £6 per head of pupils attending is the recognised cost of providing school building accommodation in this colony, when proper allowance is made for the sparse population, and when the buildings are erected in brick or stone. As the number of pupils at present attending the public schools of the colony is a few hundreds under 90,000, the recognised cost of providing substantial school building accommodation for them should have been £540,000; but instead of this there has been expended on school buildings of all kinds for them, no less a sum than £847,865 15s 3d since the coming into operation of the Education Act of 1877! or 57 per cent, beyond what should have been sufficient to provide stone school buildings for all; and as we know that in our provincial district, at least, no stone or brick buildings have been erected, and nothing but flimsy wooden buildings of greatly cheaper construction, a very startling character is given to the shameful waste that has taken place under the irresponsible, and we would add, corrupt, administration of the Boards of Education.

Indeed, hard as this report hits the whole administration of the Boards, it hits the Auckland administration the hardest; for it shows that while Otago, with a considerably larger number of pupils, has only 183 schools open, and North Canterbury, with a slightly smaller number of pupils than Auckland, has 154 schools open, Auckland has 221, confirming what we have so frequently urged, that our local Board of Education has been playing havoc with the funds in erecting great numbers of needless and paltry schools, actuated in doing so mainly by political, local, or personal influences. The comment of the Minister of Education in this report is : —" Clearly, in the case of Auckland, it must be a waste of money to erect so many small schools, to say nothing of the waste of teaching power, which the creation of so many schools must involve but if the Honorable the Minister of Education had only the leisure to make enquiry, not only into the causes which have operated in having many of the small country schools erected in open defiance of the recommendations of the Inspectors, but into the relations of the contracts for these wooden buildings, for the making of wooden benches and desks, and for the providing generally of school requisites, he would no longer wonder why so " clearly in the case of Auckland it must be a waste of money to erect so many schools." It is not a pleasant thing to find our district placed in such an unenviable eminence, but an analysis of the figures makes the matter worse. For the total amount expended by our Auckland Board in school building has been till date £175,699 16s 3d, or at the rate of about £10 3s 3d per head for the 17,291 pupils attending ; so that as £4 per caput for pupils is the recognised cost for wooden school buildings, Auckland, if the money had been properly expended, should have shown at this hour it had been requisite —2£ times as much school accommodation as at present! We do not know how it may be in Southern provincial districts — and from the Minister singling out Auckland with such marked emphasis and from these figures, it cannot be so bad, —but we have no hesitation in saying that until the power to squander public funds irresponsibly on the erection and furnishing of school buildings is taken out• of the hands of local Boards of Education, there will be no means of checking this wasteful and shameless extravagance until the source of the funds is dry. The Minister says, speaking of this " excessive waste in the administration of the building grants," " that there has been excessive waste, nobody will venture to deny. The causes are: Want of some general plan to govern the erection of schoolbuildings throughout the colony, want of system in the expenditure, want of general supervision over the erection of buildings by some competent and experienced person, whose business it should be to see that school buildings are placed where they are required, and only where they are required," etc.; in fact, all these " wants" may be summarised in the "want" of a firm hand in the central administration empowered to prevent the public moneys being wasted for unworthy private ends ; and we are perfectly sure that until that object is secured, the education system of the colony will be a Maelstrom that will swallow up all the money that may be thrown to it, and be still unsated.

Making an estimate of 5000 as the number of new pupils that will be added annually in the natural course of things, the Minister estimates that £20,000 a year at the least, or more sufficiently £30,000, will,be required to meet the new demands. If we recollect aright, the Wellington Board of Educa-

tion demanded so much recently for its sole requirements for a single year, and we are perfectly sure that our local Board could >. take so much, and spend it, and cry for more ; and if it is hoped that the demands of the districts may be met by such a sum, we very strongly recommend the Minister to stand firmly by his suggestion, and have it made conditional by Parliament that the money shall be kept under the strict control of the Education Department, and that not a farthing of it be placed at the disposal of the Boards of Education, which, in the enormous extravagance of the past, have proved the unfitness of irresponsible bodies for spending moneys which they have had no share in raising. When it is seen from this report that if the £847,865 15s 3d already voted had not been ruinously squandered, there would have been a surplus now for providing additional school accommodation for the natural increase of pupils all over the colony for the next ten years, that fact should be sufficient to peremptorily demand that such a reckless squandering power should be curbed. The source whence this sum of twenty or thirty thousand pounds a year may be found is the principal question raised in this valuable paper prepared by the Minister of Education. He rightly says that it is not to be provided from borrowed money. Necessity as well as right reason determines that; and he inclines to the principle that the charge for school buildings should be laid on the Consolidated Fund. His principal reason for objecting to the cost of school buildings being made a local charge on the districts, is a fear that it would ultimately lead to a violation of the democratic principle of free education. In how far this contention is tenable we shall consider on a subsequent occasion.