SCHOOL DISCIPLINE

Southland Times, Issue 17876, 4 September 1918, Page 5

SCHOOL DISCIPLINE

PARENT’S STRANGE VIEWS. (Per United Press Association.) WAIMATE, September 3. Mr V. G. Day, S.M., heard a case this morning, in which William Clark, a householder, laid an information against Andrew Bain, headmaster of the Waimate District High School, for assault on informant’s 11-year-old son, Ernest Raymond Clark. The case is the sequel to the refusal of informant to allow his son to participate in orderly duties in rotation with all other boys in picking up lunch papers, etc., in the school grounds. When the boy first refused at his father’s instigation Mr Bain suspended the boy. The parent appealed first to the School Committee and then to the Education Board. Both bodies informed Clark that his boy might come back to school if Clark would undertake his obedience to the headmaster. On August 6 Clark sent the boy back admittedly to get evidence for the case then being worked up. The boy entered the school before the bell rang, and the headmaster ordered him out. Informant to-day foiled to show in evidence that the headmaster laid a hand on the boy, but it was shown that the boy left the room when ordered, the headmaster not touching his person. The Magistrate, in dismissing the charge of assault, said even if the headmaster had, as alleged, lifted the boy out of his seat by the collar this would not have constituted an assault. Incidentally (he Magistrate deplored the parent’s attitude as subversive of all discipline. No wonder there were conscientious objectors about when such points of view were held!