POOR MEN PAY FOR RICH MEN'S CHILDREN.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume VI, Issue 310, 28 March 1879, Page 7

POOR MEN PAY FOR RICH MEN'S CHILDREN.

Governor Robinson, of New York, cannot see the Justice of taxing poor men for the higher education of rich men's children. He is oldfashioned enough to believe that the common-school system' was intended for the general good, and not that of a class. The hi^h schools, called colleges, which have become excrescences on the system, he regards with decided disfavour. The common schools fulfil their proper purpose when they give the children of the State a fair Jingnsn education. To levy taxes upon the masses for the support of colleges for the children of the few, Gov. Robinson considers " a species of legalised robbery," and he is entirely right. He holds that tne argument that, as these normal colleges are open to all, they are a benefit to the poor as well as to the rich, is an utter fallacy. " The children of the poor," he truly says, " generally leave the schools with a common-school education, and go to work for themselves or their parents ; yet while the poor men's children are thus at work, his mtl^-home is taxed to give the children of others a college education " Hunting men everywhere are coming round to the views so forcibly expressed by Gov. Robinson. .Looked at from the standpoint of rugged honesty, it is a shamefully mean thing to tax a labouring man who needs every dollar he can earn, to give a college education to the son of a merchant or a lawyer. This is the actual operation of the system in every State which supports high schools or normal colleges out of the common-school fund. Gov. Robinson's vigorous protest is sensible and timely, and we hope it will be heeded. Educate your children as well as you can, by all means, but don't ask your hardworking neighbour to pay for it.— Pilot. *