OUR AUCKLAND CORRESPONDENT ON EDUCATIONAL MATTERS.

Otago Witness, Issue 1499, 7 August 1880, Page 23

OUR AUCKLAND CORRESPONDENT ON EDUCATIONAL MATTERS.

The steps which are now being taken by the Hon. Mr Waterhouse in the Legislative Council to get at the real cost of the educational system of the Colony are excit. ing considerable surprise in Auckland. The people are aa firmly wedded as ever to the principles of State secular education, but they are getting appalled and disgusted at its increasing officialism, expenditure, and the abuses which are growing up with rank luxuriance. At the last meeting of the Education Board the Chairman (Mr Moat), said that "the city teachers had simply set the Board and the School Committee at defiance," and so far as subsequent events have gone, have done it successfully, too. The chronic frequency of indisposition manifested by the teachers of all grades is getting quite up to the Victorian percentage—where the abnormal phenomenon has at last attracted attention—and as salary ia running on, the incentives to convalescence are not partiticularly strong. There have been also caßes periodical retirement into private life, caused fey " severe nervous prostration." That is, I believe, the popular euphemistic phrase for the above peouliar complaint;, for which social seolusions a grateful country is content to spend and be spent. If ever our national system is undermined and overthrown, it will be by the follies of its friends rather than the assaults of its enemies, and the Catholic hierarchy are looking on with undisguised satisfaction at each hideous excrescence whloh is being formed on our excellent system of secular education, which only needs common honesty in its administration to make it the envy of every dependency of the Empire.