Musings and Meditations

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLI, Issue 6, 5 August 1908, Page 2

Musings and Meditations

By

Dog Toby

SCHOOL COMMITTEES

IT is customary for dwellers in our towns, and others who know but little of the conditions prevailing in our country districts to sneer at the school committees in isolated out-back places, and to laugli at the members composing such committees as being ignorant jackanapes puffed up with brief authority. Such an attitude towards these bodies is wholly uncalled for. I have met many members of the local school boards in the country, who were the equal in both education and brains of many who have gained seats •m boards of education. They have been shrewd, practical men, fully alive to the duties and responsibilties of their position, and taking a keen interest in the affairs of the school and the district. <J> <S> <S> In New Zealand especially you can never judge of a man’s education by his surroundings. I knew a Presbyterian minister, new to his work, who hastily assumed that all our country settlers were ignorant rustics. He called at a place where the man was working in his vegetable garden, attired in the regulation bluchers and dungarees. He was asked into the kitchen, and reproached the settler with the pagan heathenism in which he and his neighbours were sunk. The man listened and smoked in silence for some time. He then asked his visitor if he would like to come into the other room. The minister was astonished to find the walls lined with books in Hebrew, Latin, Greek, and French, as well as standard editions of English classics. He discovered to 4? is dismay that his host had taken a brilliant degree at Cambridge, had w-on two prizes for Greek Testament, and knew- a great deal more about the Bible than he did himself. J can recollect a man applying to me for work. He spoke with the unmistakable accent of culture, and took Cornish’s edition of Horace from the shelf with the remark that he always felt that Virgil had found the Latin tongue inadequate, while Horace had found it exactly suited to his neatly-turned, but wholly unimpassioned. odes. He was an old Etonian, and had taken a first in Mods. <?> <s> I do not say that these things are the rule, rather are they the exception. But one more often finds such men in the country school committee than in the town. It is not, however, men like this that I have chiefly in mind. The average member of the country committee is the ordinary settler, who has taken up a piece of ground in the rough, and spent most of his time in the open air, working on his place. He is no faddist, wanting ten minutes’ instruction a week to be given to the children in a hundred different subjects; he knows theoretically very little about educational methods. But ho is a shrewd judge of the progress the children are making; he knows whether his boys are being trained to be practical, manly, and self-reliant; he knows whether his girls are being trained to be helpful, prudent, and considerate. <•> <S> <s> The complaint is made that these ■people annoy and harrass the school teacher who resents their interference, and it is urged that all the -work they do could be done far more efficiently by the Board of Education. Both these statements I very much doubt. In some cases, perhaps, committees take a wrong view of their duties, and allow small local jealousies and prejudices to influence them in their attitude towards the teaeher. On the other hand, I know numberless instances where the committee has been the teacher’s best friend. The members have always helped in every way possible, and done their beat io make the teacher’s lot less lonely aanl more enjoyable. They support him in any action calculated to advance the best interests of tbe school.

But the great reason for the existence of these bodies is that they are on the spot, and know the requirements of the district as no one else does. They attend to the surroundings of the school, keep the playground dry and well drained, plant trees to make the spot less barren, and often give of their time and labour to supplement the scanty improvements sanctioned by the Board. They not only do this, but they get up entertainments for the children, and promote concerts and social gatherings to provide funds for school libraries and games. <s>«><& For some years I was a member of such a committee. I was much struck with the interest the members took, one and all, in the school. We had the munificent allowance of £9 a year from the Board, and but for local effort the children would have lacked for many things essential to their health and comfort. We were not, perhaps, highly educated! in the sense that members of Boards of Education and Ministers for Education are highly educated; perhaps our accent and grammar were not altogether Parrisian, but we knew where New -.York was—a feat on which an educational authority so lately plumed himself —and we could read and write, some of us in two or three languages. And I was fully impressed with this fact, that, ignorant as we were and country bumpkins as wa were, we knew a great deal more about the requirements of our district and the wants of our children than the Board did. If it were not for the local committee, many a small school would be far, worse off than it is to-day.