TOBACCO AND LEARNING.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1193, 11 January 1895, Page 33

TOBACCO AND LEARNING.

TO THE EDITOR.

Sir, —In your issue of the 2nd January appears a brief statement that " In spite of a correspondent who wrote the other day, the presentation of pipes to schoolmasters appears to be popular. One was given the other day by some of the Auckland Grammar School boys to Mr Sloman." If the above statement be true, and I find a difficulty in believing it, two or a dozen blacks will not make one white, and my opinion is that the Auckland alleged impropriety is the graver of the two, becavise the person accused is said to be master of a public school, and any impropriety on his part ought to be noticed by the Minister of Education. Reading between the lines of the paragraph in question, the writer of it, I regret to say, seems to approve of the conduct of the master of the Wellington private school and that of the master of the Auckland public school. My idea about the capacity of individuals who a*-e selected to train the youth of the Colony is that, like Caesar's wife, they should be without suspicion. In England a scholar persisting in the injurious habit of smoking tobacco after having been warned to

desist would be expelled, and, as far as I am aware, New Zealand is the first English-speaking community which can claim the honour (?) of witnessing the youth of the colony presenting tobaccopipes and pouches to their teachers in token of esteem. If presentations of tobacco-pipes and pouches by pupils to their teachers are in the slightest danger of becoming "popular," outsiders may well be justified when criticising our educational system, in exclaiming " O Tempora, O Mores."

But, in spite of the writer's allegation that these presentations " appear to be popular," I am glad to bo able to furnish you with evidence that at least one editor is not of that opinion. Enclosed I send you the remarks of the Manawatn Standard on the subject.—l am, &c, A Parent. The following is the extract referred to :

" The boys attending a private school in "Wellington perpetrated a grim joke upon the headmaster recently, or perhaps because they were hardly trained up in the way they should go, were the unconscious means of administering a rebuke to the gentleman in question. Very few parents like to see their children take to the habit of smoking, and so it must have been with a good deal of surprise that they noticed the pupils in question showed their appreciation of the intellectual fare provided for them at the school by presenting their instructor with a pipe and tobacco pouch. Did the gentleman smoke in school or had he been giving lessons in the use of the weed to the boys as part of the school curriculum. Surely one of these extraordinary occurrences must have taken place to have warranted the presentation in question."