FEWER CHILDREN

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23055, 4 June 1938, Page 12

FEWER CHILDREN

When the Minister of Education went on tour ten or twenty years ago, he was met in almost every centre with complaints of overcrowding in schools and urgent demands for more accommodation. A reminder of what formerly was a continuing problem was given at Otakiri, in the Bay of Plenty, on Thursday, when the Minister was faced with acute overcrowding in a small school. Nowadays, however, such occasions are fewer. The Minister still receives plenty of requests but not so often is the reason found in the growth of the school population. New buildings are wanted to replace old, or schools have to follow the people from industrialised areas into the new suburbs, but the former jostle of the rising generation no longer speaks in the categorical imperative. The melancholy fact is that in a so-called "young country," children are fewer. The 1926 census showed 134,431 children under 5 years ; the 1936 census only 116,738. The decrease in 10 years was almost 18,000 or over 13 per cent, although in the same period the general population increased by about 10 per cent. Children in the age-gi-oup 5 to 9 years, also decreased. So the old problem of overcrowded schools is no longer so acute but it has been replaced by a far more serious one, the slowing down of human increase and the gradual ageing of the people. The fact of overcrowding was in itself deplorable but it was symptomatic of a vigorous and expanding people. Far better that a Minister should be harassed at every point of his tour with demands for larger schools than that New Zealand should be, as it is now, face to face with racial decline, if present tendencies persist.