The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR O'CLOCK P.M. Resurrexi. TUESDAY, JULY 13, 1875.

Thames Star, Volume VII, Issue 2035, 13 July 1875, Page 2

The Evening Star. PUBLISHED DAILY AT FOUR O'CLOCK P.M. Resurrexi. TUESDAY, JULY 13, 1875.

The friends of education in Christchurch are alarmed at a notification, recently issued, that certain persons must accept their appointments as school teachers, subject to such alterations V salary as may hereafter be ' found necessary. They argue—and justly toor-tbat any diminution in the scale of >the payments now made to teachers will be followed by an inferior class of pejsons competing, for the appointments offered, ; and consequently by a lower standard, of education accorded to the children taught. But if* this state of things exists in; Canterbury, whose provincial legislators, wise in their generation, have secured a large land fund from whence the necessary expenditure of the education department may be supplied, alarm becomes, to tis of Auckland, doubly alarming, when we consider that education in this province, as far-as the Education Board is concerned, is practically at a stand stillfor want of fund?, even if it be not in some instances positively retrograding. And yet we live in a progressive age, or one that wishes to be .thought such, and no doubt echo in in our own hearts Diomed's prayer, though not couched in Homer's language,

and pray, as in other things, so also in education, " that we may be better than our fathers." The fact is that we are now experiencing the culpable want of foresight which those before us were guilty of, in not providing, when they had the power, for the wants, present and to come, of their own province: they sowed the wind, and we of this day are reaping the w'tirlwind. How—when Auckland was in the zenith of its -power in JN"ew Zealand, and could call to its aid more members of the House of Bepresentatires to onforce its decrees than all the rest of the colony put together—those to 1 whom the management of its affairs were entrusted could be so culpably regardless of its interests as to make no provision ior the future, is a matter of bitter wonder when we regard the crippled state of the Board of Education through want of funds; funds which should be, considering the bygone power of the province, so easily forthcoming. Two motions have been already made to replenish the ail-but exhausted exchequer of the Board of Education. One •manated from Mr Pargaville, by which j a tax on gum was to be made to contribute some thousands to supply the pressing need; the other from Mr Kees, who proposed that • all incomes over £300 per annum should be taxed at the rate of one percent, for the same purpose But of the first of these, it need only be said, that it would be manifestly unfair that one hard working section of the community—the gum-diggers— should bear the burden of educating the whole of the Province; and of the other, that the elaborate machinery requsite for collecting a tax of such a nature as the income tax, would be so expensive as, probably, to leave but a small surplus available for the purpose required; to say nothing of the difficulty which would then exist of discriminating nicely between those whose incomes stop at £299, and those whose incomes go on to tne required three hundred and one.

One way, however, there is which seems to suggest itself at present to meet this need. At present no parent or guardian pays anything for actual attendance at school, the tax of £1. on householders, and 10s on bachelors, of the age of twenty-one and upwards who have no houses of their own, helps to constitute a fund, which the head of a family still further augments by a subscription of 5s per annum for every child up to the number of three under his care, no niatter whether they attend the school or not. Out of the fund thus formed, augmented by votes from the Provincial Government, each school teacher receives his or her pay ; awarded, not according to the" amount of work done, or success achieved, but simply in proportion to the" average number of children who have been in attendance during the past three months;" so that looking at it in a paying point of view, it is not so much an object to the teacher that the children under him actually learn anything, as that he may be able to show a large quarterly return, properly authenticated, of those in attendance at the school. This is: certainly unsatisfactory ; people in general are apt to undervalue benefits for which they pay little or nothing, and many children are now kept at home on the most frivolous pretences,, or sent so irregularly that it is utterly impossible they can do justice either to their masters, or themselves; whereas, if a payment of from 3d to 6d per week were exacted from every child in attendance at school, it would- induce the parents (man is prone, we know, to try and get his moneys worth) to see that his child attended during the week paid for. The sums thus paid could easily be collected, by each child bringing, every Monday morning, the amount fixed, to the master, to be entered against his or her name; and a fund would thus be formed, to be dealt with by the committee of each school for the payment of teachers, &c. In addition to this, there would still remain the amount derived from the tax on householders and bachelors, and the tax of 5s on children ; which, however, we would suggest, should bo levied " only on children who did not attend any school either public or private." This would still leave almost as large a sum as at present obtained for the Education Board to deal with in augmenting the salaries of teachers and general expenses. It is obvious that-—at any rate in the majority of instances—the salary of teachers would require augmentation, and this we urge would be done with much ißore justice to the teacher, and advantage to the scholar if it were made, not in proportion to the average number of children in attendance, but in proportion to the number of those who came up to a certain standard of proficiency in their work, to be judged of by the School Inspector; and the great incentive then to the head of a school would be, not to have a few bright or flash scholars, but to have a good general average throughout his .school, to the manifest advantage of the community at large. In England under the new Education Act a grant is made of four 'shillings per annum to the school for every child who passes the examination in either reading, writing, or arithmetic, so that the master may bo benefited to the amount of twelve shillings for every child he passes in •the three It's, besides being allowed to offer them for examination in other subjects. Only those children, however, are allowed to be examined who have attended the school a stated number of times. Some such scheme as this, we think v might be profitably adopted by the Provincial Government. The present system is inadequate, as is apparent by its present standstill, and some movement must be made

to furnish sufficient education for a rapidly increasing population. The time for collecting the Education Bate has again come round, and no doubt many will now, as heretofore, turn their thoughts in the direction of education and grumble; if not loudly, at any rate deeply, on being called upon to pay a tax which fails in producing the results to obtain which it was first levied. The remedy for all this, as far as we can see, rests with the people. They must insist upon the Colonial Government assuming charge of educational matters, and establishing one system for the colony; until which is done the anomalies, and the positive injustice which exists through one province possessing large endowments for education while another has to impose an obnoxious tax will still continue to weaken and undermine the efforts of all the friends of liberal education.