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New Zealand Herald, Volume XXV, Issue 9105, 13 July 1888, Page 4

As we see from our Wellington correspondent's telegram, 1 Mr. Cooper's proposed scheme of retrenchment in education expenditure • has* been favourably received at Wellington, and will.be brought under the notice of the Premier and Minister of Education ; . and we sincerely rejoice that it is so. Mr. Cooper has not gone the length we have advocated, but, as we have said before, ! he has made out an excellent case so far as he goes, and his proposal shows a bona fide and feasible retrenchment *to the substantial amount of £75,513 ; and if our agitation of the question and our > effort to pin down retrenchment to specific particulars—instead of dealing in vague generalities about the " necessity for retrenchment," meaning nothing,—result in the realisation of Mr. Cooper's proposal, we shall have no hesitation in cheerfully foregoing our own ideas on the subject, and giving him the kudos he deserves. It will be recollected . that Mr. Cooper's * scheme of retrenchment contemplates the readjustment of teachers' salaries on a uniform basis throughout the colony, instead of the anomalous and reasonless system or no-system, existing' at present, under which differences of hundreds of pounds in salaries are shown for the same work —often- ♦ times indeed the teachers of smaller schools having the larger salaries. By. such readjustment of salaries on an equitable basis, and by a reduction in the surplus *of teaching power to a strength proved by analogy to *be sufficient, he shows an annual saving of £67,513 ; the balance of his proposed savings being made up of £5000 by the omission of the seventh standard from free education, and by making a small charge of two per cent, on cost by way of rental on the teachers' residences with which some of the schools are supplied, making a sum of £3000. Besides this, Mr. Cooper would decrease the building allowance from loan by £30,000, ana have the cost of native schools and school buildings£2l,ooo — charged to the natives # themselves, on the grounds we assume that the natives do not contribute their ' proper share to the taxation of the colony. We have given this brief resume of Mr. Cooper's proposals that our readers may have them well in mind in view of the fact of their being pressed on the attention of Ministers by Mr. Goldie, who is one of those chiefly known for-- resistance to any interference with the administration of the system. The charging of the native schools against the natives themselves would, of course, involve political questions of a difficult nature • and the question of reduction of the building vote being from loan, is aside from the question of the decrease of the vote for education from the consolidated revenue. We therefore regard Mr. Cooper's proposal as practically ' involving a saving of taxation for education to the amount of £75.51 a wr

annum. Now, as Mr. Cooper's principal retrenchment consists in dispensing with the services of 578 teachers, shown to be surplus beyond the teaching power required, it is manifest that our proposal to suspend the practice of making " nurseries" of the State schools by raising the school age to seven years as really intended by the Education Act, would aid Mr. Cooper's reform * indeed, could carry his reform to another degree. There are nearly twenty thousand little children suffering physically, mentally, and permanently from the " baby farming of the State, and if the financial pinch results in their being liberated to the free air of heaven and their natural play, generations yet unborn of stalwart colonists will have reason to bless the depression that saved the stamina and pith of the race. But besides this, it will smooth the way for Mr. Cooper's revision of the teaching staff. And there are fifteen thousand, or thereabouts, almost all the children of the well-to-do, receiving in the fifth to the seventh standards a higher education than the framers of

our Education Act, and the Act itself, ever contemplated, and receiving it from the bitter taxation of the poor and the removal of this needless burthen entirely, which Mr. Cooper in the "excision of the seventh standard would remove in part, would smoothe the way for his further retrenchment; and would probably give lucrative employment to the greater number of his 578 teachers released from duty. Our scheme fits into that of Mr. Cooper's in every way. _ But while we still maintain that the reform of oar education administration will be incom- . Elete till it is carried to the point we have indicated, we shall gladly and gratefully accept of Mr. Cooper's, showing a saving on the system of over £75,000. That such an amount can be saved in the opinion of some of the staunchest— reasoning and. capable—defenders of things as they are ; and indeed could have been saved before the agitation for retrenchment was begun, is the best answer to the blatant cry, "the education system • must not -be touched." The true friends of the system are those who .firmly say it shall and must be touched; and for its own good and safety as well as in the interests of an • overburthened people, that it must be ; purged of the abuses that left untouched will be its ruin.