RIOTING AND IGNORANCE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIX, Issue 21165, 23 April 1932, Page 14

RIOTING AND IGNORANCE.

Sir, —I was astonished at the want of logical reasoning displayed in a letter in your issue of Thursday, under the above caption, and emanating from the executive of the New Zealand Educational Institute. The letter dogmatically asserts "that the recent riots in Dunedin and Auckland were the result of want of education." Seeing that New Zealand has maintained, for some 60 years, a most liberal, threefold system of free and compulsory education, how can it be reasonably said that New Zealanders are in a state of ignorance and lacking education. The institute has missed the bull's eye and should try another shot. It probably means that it is the quality and not the quantity of education that was the cause of the riot-s. I would suggest that our education system has been worked on partly wrong lines. Although a crowded syllabus is in vogue, the inculcation of morality, Christianity and the uplifting principles of decent ctizenship, as instilled into the minds of the scouts has been completely ignored. The undue facilities afforded our adolescent youth for qualifying for urban jobs, coupled with the lavish expenditure of borrowed millions in making the cities luxuriously attractive, have tended to crowd the big centres to the depopulation of the countryside. By proper management we should now have thousands of the discontented unemployed comfortably settled, in groups, on our spare lands, finding an outlet for their wasted energy in the same manner as hundreds of small settlers are contentedly finding a livelihood. Such a state of things I found existing in France during the middle seventies. Previous to the adoption of our system of education we had in New Zealand periods of depression quite as acute as the present one, and which did not result in strikes and riots, but the unemployed helped themselves by pushing out into the country, where they obtained food and gold. April 21, 1932. John A. Beale.