SCHOOL BUILDINGS

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22916, 20 December 1937, Page 13

SCHOOL BUILDINGS

TEACHERS' RESIDENCES REPLACEMENT PROBLEM MANY YEARS' WORK' INVOLVED [BT TELEGRAPH —OWN COBRESPONDENT] •WELLINGTON, Sunday " The need of buildings is one of our most urgent problems," said the Minister of Education, the Hon. P. Eraser, speaking at an afternoon tea given by tho Wellington branch of the New Zealand Educational Institute. On a tour of inspection some time ago he had found that there was hardly a habitable police station or policeman's residence in the Dominion, and tho position in the schools was worse. Teachers' houses throughout the Dominion were in very many cases really not fit to be lived in at all. In Canterbury, for example, said Mr. Fra&er, where winter nights were frosty, there were cases where teachers had to cross the yard in order t6 obtain a bath. That sort of thing was reminiscent of the oonditions of 50 years ago- In many cases old buildings were of sound kauri timber, well constructed, to last 100 years; and it was hard sometimes to persuade people that if the wood was good there was anything bad about tho building itself. As an example of the unsuitable types of buildings erected in tho past, the Minister quoted an example of a school most substantially constructed in stone, with Gothic arched doorways and windows in keeping with the Gothic architecture of other public buildings in the locality, and with the Gothic ideas of the early settlers —splendidly designed to resist any invasion of sunshine or fresh air. Yet it would be a colossal undertaking to pull it down and replace it. " We've got an enormous programme, extending over a long period of years, but I sincerely hope that programme will be successfully carried out," said Mr. Eraser.