The School Age.

Star (Christchurch), Volume LXVI, Issue 20314, 25 May 1934, Page 6

The School Age.

Dear Sir,—l am very glad that the Minister of Education gave a straight-from-the-shoulder answer to those teachers who are clamouring for . the admission of children to the schools at age of five. I cannot imagine that the interests of the children are the paramount consideration in one case in ten. It seems to me that a child going to school at this early age gains nothing in the fixing of values of one kind and another that it would not acquire by normal contacts in the home or in association with . other children. But the mischief comes at the other end, when this same child is discharged from school to become a wage-earner at a very tender age. I think we make too much of a fetish of education ending when a child leaves school. It ought to continue in some form or other throughout life, but I do say that the monotony, if not slavery, of the tasks accorded to the average boy of poor parents leaving school retard real education in the things that make for happier leisure, and I should regard the entry of children at five as an actual theft of a useful year of education at the other end of their schooling.—l am, etc., NO SLAVE DRIVER