Out of School Bounds.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXIX, Issue XII, 20 September 1902, Page 718

Out of School Bounds.

They are a sensible people in the Mayfield (Auckland) district. With but few exceptions the parents there have signed an instruction to the schoolmaster requesting him to exercise his authority over the pupils not only within school hours, but on their way to and from the school. My readers are already aware that there has been trouble in many districts—serious trouble—over this divided authority of school and home, the point at issue being just where the one should leave off and the other begin, tn many cases the parents arequite willing that immediately their children pass beyond their own gates they should come under the jurisdiction of the schoolmaster, and most schoolmasters are content to accept this extension of their kingdom, holding- that they can more easily govern within school bounds if they are allowed to exercise powers of correction over the hitherto neutral ground that separates home from school. There are, however, foolish parents who resent this larger authority on the part of the schoolmaster as encroaching on the liberty of the pupil, or on the domain of the parent. My own experience is that those who lake this view generally exercise ve~y little authority at all over their children, the only judicious restraint the latter- ever know being that exercised by the teacher when they are immediately under his hands. The parents who do exercise parental control will not object to delegate their authority to the wise schoolmaster during such times as they have not the children under their own eyes. They will be glad of his taking the added responsibility. Not that he can hope to exercise the supervision he would desire, but he at least may constitute a recognised authority in that somewhat lawless borderlaed betweeif the home and the school. He relieves the policeman of a part of his duty the latter is least anxious to perform—the control of the youthful generation —and by doing so wards off the ■tern arm of the civic law, which,

when it falls on the young, often does more harm than good. We have every now and again to regret this interference of the civic authority in the place of the parental, which is wanting, but perhaps we would not have occasion to regret if the schoolmaster were entrusted with wider powers.