The Opunake Times. TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 1905. CHANGING SCHOOL BOOKS.

Opunake Times, Volume XXI, Issue 751, 27 June 1905, Page 2

The Opunake Times. TUESDAY, JUNE 27, 1905. CHANGING SCHOOL BOOKS.

In various parts of the colony efforts are being made by Education Boards to have an alteration in school books. The suggested change is meeting with a good deal of opposition, and it is not to be wondered at, as parents feel it a tax upon them to. be continually buying new books. If the Boards persist in the alteration, and the “ changing system ” spreads through the colony, it will devolve upon the parents and committeemen to raise their voices against the iniquity. The Auckland Herald, referring to the subject, says that the continual “ chopping and changing ” of school books is utterly valueless and a brutal taxing upon the pockets of the poor. We are supposed to have “ free, secular, and compulsory ” education, but it really costs the parents of to-day more to send their children to our State schools than it cost their parents in the days before “ free ” education. For those in authority and influence have a mania for the changing of books and the ordering of new books that is as heartless and thoughtless as it is ignorant and pedantic. It cannot cost the average parent less than sixpence weekly for each child for books and school material—or a quarter of a million sterling tax upon the colony, of which not less than £200,000 is practically wasted. This is a most false and pernicious system, doubtless profitable to some, but less than unprofitable to the community. Publishing firms have no sooner got one book off their hands than they immediately go to work to produce another slightly different, knowing that our so-called “ educationalists ” are silly enough to be persuaded, not to buy it themselves, but to order the school children to buy it. Unquestionably there should be uniform school books for each standard, practically permanent, so that they could be passed from child to child until worn out. Matters change so slowly that if schools books were changed once or twice in a generation it would be ample. Even that would be unnecessary in many subjects, as those who got their education through the great educational classics ought to be well aware from personal experience. At the best it is an idle fad, for which parents pay, to think that the newest book is the best and that we are always changing for the better; at the worst, it is a very objectionable method of pushing the publishing business.