"A GLORIOUS HERITAGE."

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20874, 14 November 1929, Page 14

"A GLORIOUS HERITAGE."

OUR DEBT TO THE PIONEERS. Mr A. W. Jones, chairman of the Southland Education Board, remarking that, on an occasion such as the jubilee of the Queenstown Public School, it was inevitable that one should, in the words of Shelley, “ look before and after,” paid, in the course of the celebrations, an earnest tribute to the pioneer settlors. “At the end of 50 years,” he said, “ it is natural that we should look backwards on the long road, and sometimes the hard road, that has led us to the present, and cast our eyes forward to the pathway that lies through the coming years. It is wise for us all to take stock from time to time, and this is decidedly an occasion for such a process. We may try to learn from the history of the past lessons for our guidance in the future. Of one thing I am quite sure, if we who are so sympathetically interested in the education of the young make mistakes it will bo simply because we are human—and to orr Is human. Yet, looking to the past and giving due consideration to any errors that may have been made, I think we can cheerfully and confidently answer the old, old question, ‘Quo vadisT ’ (‘ Whither goest thou?’), with an inspiring assurance' that we are treading the path to an ampler day and a greater future than education in Now Zealand has yet visualised.

"The Roman of old proudly vaunted his citizenship of the great old Empire. ‘Givis Romanus sum* (‘I am a Roman citizen’) was his boast and challenge to the world, but he had not nearly as good reasons for his boast as we have to boast of our British citizenship, and of our nationality as New Zealanders. We are the heirs of a glorious patrimony, We have Inherited from our pioneering forbears a beautiful land flowing with milk and honey, which they found a wilderness and left a Canaan. From them, too, we have inherited the noble tradition which places the education of our young people in the very forefront of all great national interests. In tho early years when life was much harder, money scarcer, comforts fewer, they did not grudge to sacrifice personal case in order to establish and maintain a good educational system. With means far less and opportunities far fewer they laid down on solid foundations the structure of national education which stands to-day. We may have made some changes here, some additions there, but the principles of the pioneers remain—to provide every child in the country with as good and sound an education as as is possible for him to acquire. A statesman once defined wise legislation as that which would make it easy for men to do right and difficult to do wrong. Varying that phrase, I would say that the aim of all those interested in education in New Zealand to-day is to make it easy for every boy or girl to secure a good education and difficult or impossible for them to go unlearned and illiterate altogether. “ It is almost hard to believe that the lust for gold ratjier than the love of Nature’s magnificent glories, flung in a riot of extravagance round your beautiful district, was responsible for the founding of Queenstown; but so it was. Here flocked the gold diggers, here they recovered, from the surrounding hills and mountains and gullies, gold of a very great aggregate value. When the gold was dug out ‘ they folded their tents, like the Arabs, and silently stole away,’ but they had done a service which we ought not to forget to-day. They founded the town here, they opened up the district for people who came here for health and beautiful scenery and invigorating climate rather than for gold, and laid the foundations for the school whose jubilee we arq celebrating to-day We do well to remember the great old pioneers.”