When Boys Should Leave School.

Poverty Bay Herald, Volume XXVI, Issue 8408, 6 January 1899, Page 4

When Boys Should Leave School.

" Whkm should a boy leave school for business ; or at what age should he leave ; and what should he learn before leaving ?" are questions which Mr C. K. Bevan-Browu, the principal of the Christchurch Boys' High School, said he had been asked. Host hoys, he said, left when they were about fifteen. This question had 6cen raised in England by Mr Bryce, who said: "The years from fifteen to seventeen are the most precious years in the boy's education, and looking at it from a merely business point of view, it is very bad business on the part of any parent who can afford to keep his boy at school so long to remove him until he is about seventeen." That he (Mr Bevan-Brown) believed to be entirely true. He believed the best equipment a. boy could take to business was a welltrained mind. What should he learn when at school ? He believed this so-called commercial education for young boys was a great mistake. It might make a boy a good mechanical clerk, a good penman, able to address envelopes, todockct, to label, and to typewrite, and so on, and no doubt many employers were glad to get such boys, but they wanted something more to make them good business men. If they became so, it would be owing to the inherent energy and shrewdness of the race, and in spite of the want of a proper education, a want which they would always feel. The English, both at Home and in the colonies, were very narrow in their ideas on this subject, and it was said that the rigidity born of the narrqwness was transferring some of their trade in the East to their more nimble and cultured rivals. English firms and employers were largely responsible for the mistaken ideas of English parents on this question. They wanted to get good mechanical clerks. Apart from what, from a business point of view, it was best to do, we must look at it also from a human and from a national point of view. The boy must be a man and a citizen as well as a money-getter ; and it was most desirable that when he was young and able to learn he should receive such a training as might enable him, when he grew up, to enter wiih intelligence and gusto into the life and thought of the great world around him. We should do well, perhaps, to take a few hints from our great rivals in commerce, the Germans and Americans. It was the fashion to point to Germany when urging the importance of technical education. But we must remember that Germans demanded a thorough course of elementary and secondary instruction betore they , specialised, and that it was on this solid foundation that they reared their structure of technical education. We were, accustomed to think of the Americans as a very practical and shrewd race. He was interested and surprised to learn from Mr and Mrs Sydney Webb, when they were here, and afterwards from Mr Woodthorpe, \ that whereas in England, and he feared in the colonies, it is considered a disqualification for business men to have been at a university, iv America it was the common practice for business men not only to give their sons a full secondary course, but also to send them to the university ; and that they believed payed from a business point of view. Of course, he knew that all he had said required to be modified by the consideration of what parents could afford. Many a parent might grant all he said, and yet reply they simply could not afford to keep their sons at school any longer. But many parents, he was persuaded, acted wrongly simply because of erroneous notions.