CONFERENCE ON EDUCATION.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LVI, Issue 17229, 4 August 1919, Page 4

CONFERENCE ON EDUCATION.

The Education Board is to be congratulated oh its decision to call district members of Parliament to a conference on the all-important subject of educational reform. The board apparently realises that the necessity for a greatly increased expenditure on the primary schools is admitted in principle by the whole community, and that the practical question is now one of ways and means. Anyone who gives the subjects mentioned* in the board's letter a moment's- consideration must j realise that they involve in the aggregate a very large sum of money, and the most direct and effective appeal to the Treasury is through the members of the House, which controls public expenditure. The grave shortcomings on which attention is now focused are due to the persistent starving of the schools over a series of years by Parliaments which took little interest in education because it was but an indifferent subject for the hustings. To do tardy justice to the schools will be expensive— that the public and Parliament may as well prepare in advance—but it would be still more expensive to continue to neglect education, and so" undermine, the whole foundations of nationhood. In almost every respect, save in the zeal and efficiency of the teachers, the present system has fallen behind requirements. Schools are too small and too few; many have constructional defects; there are not enough teachers; there is not sufficient playing space. Children are being deprived of their birth-right because Cabinets have grudged money for education, Parliaments have been indifferent, and the public has not realised the dangerous lengths to which economy was being carried. All this must be . changed. The public is now fully awake to the needs of the schools, and Auckland members who fail to attend the board's conference and to plead the cause of education in Parliament will show themselves to be strangely out of touch with the sentiment of their constituencies.