STUPID PROJECTS.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVII, Issue 1, 26 April 1889, Page 17

STUPID PROJECTS.

BUOATION, and still education, and more education ; bo that our very crossing-sweepers may be philosophers, and our shoe-blacka masters of all the sciences. It is fortunately the age of machinery, so that a cultured world may have leisure to become more cultured still. The unemployed question will be fully solved when all our workingmen are sitting at their books, and food and clothing are held in light regard by them.

Sir Robert £tout told the people the other day at Invercargill that he would never be satisfied until every child in the colony might be a high school pupil. Mr Fisher, we are also informpd, in his famous Bill makes provision for something of the kind, and even goes further dealing out scholarships and university bursaries with a lavish hand.

It may be mischievous ; it may be retrograde ; it may be benighted beyond all hope of recovery, but there are people who cannot help feeling in some sense relieved at the suggestion that there is still human nature enough left in the world to cheat all this pedantry of its reward, and defeat its plans . That, for example, waa a most refreshing letter read last Week at the meeting of the Education Board, from the Rev. Dr. Belcher, of the Dunedin High School. We do not allude to the calm and dignified attitude that had been maintained by the learned Doctor. Was it not of a King of Spain that it was related in fable that so attached bad his Majesty been to the usages of etiquette, he once, and for the last time, sat before a fire until he was burned to death, because the courtier, whose duty it was to place a screen between them, bad forgotton to perform his task ? Dr Belcmbr seems to have been gifted with a similar love of the proprieties, and a somewhat similar power of endurance. Dr. Belcher cays, that although he knew there was a rale to the

effect that boys holding scholarships, and attending at his school were liable to forfeit their scholarships if they were not well behaved, he had no where seen it laid down as to the person by whom information should be given if such boys did not behave themselves. He therefore looked on in a calm and dignified manner — except perhaps when he used the tawse as he implies that he did occasionally with sufficient vigour — while for a long time some of these " scholars " were doing anything rather than properly behaving themselves. That was the very broth of a " scholar," for instance, who from April to December last had been in punishment 32 times. Surely Dr. Belcher in his presence, whether armed with the tawse or without it, must have felt some of the excessive heat by which his great piototype, that King of Spain, was consumed in another way. What it was that induced the Doctor finally to depart from his calm and dignified attitude we are not informed ; but if it was, perhaps, a failuro of firmness on his part, it is not difficult to understand and excuse the situation.

" It seems to me," writes Dr. Belcher, *' that there are signs here that the scholars having touched the altitude, consider it their duty steadily to decline." Human nature, then, asserts itself. Cramming has done its work, and reaction sets in. Pedantry may have its way. Scholarships and university bursaries may be multiplied, and eveiy child sent to a primary school may be certainly regarded by its parents as a future ornament of the High School benches, and may, in consequence, become a fruitful cause of terror and a danger to unfortunate primary teachers. The whole mind of the colony may become weakened and turned aside from the pursuit of sure and useful courses to vague ambitions and aimless speculations. But there is human nature enough left to rescue the race. Crossing-sweepers we shall still have who are not philosophers, and shoe-blacks whose science is limited to the production of a brilliant polish . Even the problem of the machine will not be solved by the love of the workingclasses for books, and their disregard of food and clothing. A great deal more money may be unfairly and uselessly spent, but pedantry, as usual, must result in making itself ridiculous.