What the Schoolboy Doesn't Learn.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXXVI, Issue 23, 9 June 1906, Page 22

What the Schoolboy Doesn't Learn.

The deficiencies of the Dunedin youth who seeks a position in a mercantile office were shown up at a meeting of the Dunedin School Committees’ Association recently. A Bond-street merchant said: -—“ There is a great inarticulate growl about the instruction given in our publie schools. On behalf of the merchant class, I may say that when we get a boy from the primary schools in the office, we have to begin and teach him the things he should have learned years ago. 1 have had a good many boys through my hands for office work, and it is my experience, as well as of all the men I have met. that when we get a boy from the publie schools, we have to begin again and teach him simple addition, and it is three or four years before we can break him of the abominable writing he learns at school. It is a third faet that we have to teach him mannera.”