The Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 1879.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume VI, Issue 875, 28 August 1879, Page 2

The Poverty Bay Herald AND East Coast News Letter. PUBLISHED EVERY EVENING. THURSDAY, AUGUST 28, 1879.

The total expenditure on education for 1878 was £332,000, of which sum nearly one-third was spent on buildings. The number of public schools at the close of the year wss 748, of teachers 1161 (including 450 pupil teachers), and of scholars 65,040. The last item shows an increase of 9352 since 1877. There is still, however, a vast body of children outside the public education system. The total number of children in the Colony between the ages of five and fifteen is 105,208, of whom 62,245 attend the public schools. Of the 43,000 who remain to be accounted for, 14,611 are reported as attending private schools, and 9684 as "receiving tuition at home." This last item, however, is misleading, since, as the report points out, " except in families where a tutor or governess is engaged, home tuition, if imparted at all, is necessarily in most cases of a very indifferent character." Probably it is not safe to set down the number of children between five and fifteen who are receiving systematic instruction at a higher figure than 70,000, and it would thus appear that 35,000, or about a third of the whole, are as yet unreached by educational agencies of any kind. It will be, of course, the hope and: endeavour of the Education Department to bring in some considerable portion of this formidable residuum, and we may consequently expect further additions to the ' education vote. The process of extinguishing the residuum will h& disproportionately costly. To reach the children scattered over the face of remote country districts, small schools must be multiplied, and it is the small schools which run away with the money. In Westland it costs the State £10 10s. 2d. per annum for every cliiM in the schools ; in Taranaki, £6 2s. 9d. ;in Otago, £4 17s. 3d. This remarkable disparity is, of course, easily explained. Where population is sparse, schools are small, and proportionately more costly. Out of the 25 schools in Taranaki, six have less than 15 pupils, and none have more than 75. Otago, with 134 schools, has only one of 15 pupils, and has .several Jwith over 500. The probability is that most of the children now forming the residuum will have to be paid for at the Westland or Taranaki rate rather than that of Otago.