Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit THURSDAY, JULY 17, 1893. FREE EDUCATION.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XIV, Issue 3036, 27 July 1893, Page 2

Ashburton Guardian Magna est Veritas et Prævalebit THURSDAY, JULY 17, 1893. FREE EDUCATION.

Niw Zjealanders are justly pp.oud of their national system of education, and rejoice in being able to call it free. There are some who hanker very much after the ability to call it also compulsory. Secular it undoubtedly is already, as our Catholic friends keep telling us, adding also that it is * godless." Compulsory it will be, just a3 soon as Mr W. P. Reeves can get his Compulsory Education Bill into force. But in the elementary schools cf England and Wales the word " free," as applied to them, is far more comprehensive than it is as applied to the state schools of this colony. In May last, the Committee of Council on Education issued a memorandum as to free education, and the London "Times" was good enough to print the text of it in its issue of June 6, for the benefit of its readers. Such documents are not readily available in these colonies, and our readers may perhaps be pleased to read a summary of the somewhat lengthy paper, showing, as it does, that the Mother Country has gone even a step farther in the matter of " free" education than has her little daughter in the far off southern sea. The memorandum starts off by stating that under the Education Ar.t of 1891 the greater number of the elementary schools in England and Wales are now free ; but as there are districts in which all the " school places" are not free, an explanation of the right of all parents to free education is necassary, as well as how free education for their children may be abtained. The memorandum then states that "every father and mother in England and Wales has a right to free education, without payment or charge of any kind, for his or her children between the age of three and fifteen. The right to free education is not a concession to poverty, but is common to all classes alike." Instructions are then given to such as have not got free eduoation to write to the Educatien Department and claim it, either alone or in combination with others. A form is supplied for the making of this claim, and then " what free education means "is explained. After a somewhat lengthy explanation of what free education is not, the kernel of the thing is found in this sentence—" It must be wholly free, without any charge for books, slates, or anything else, and it must be at a school within a reasonable distance of the child's home." Details are then given as to how free education is provided, and the paragraph closes, with a remark that "in

districts where^there is no school board, if free places required are not provided in the voluntary schools, a school board is provided and directed to provide them." Parents who have claimed free education, but have not yet obtained it, must go on sending their children to school, even if paying fees is involved by so doing, until free places have been provided. And then comes a clause which contains a very essential difference between the system in force in England and Wales, and the system under which we work in New Zealand. This clause provides that the managers of all schools, whether t»iey are free schools or not, are bound to provide a proper supply of books, slater and other school apparatus, and cannot compel a parent to provide books, either by periodical payment or by purchase ; nor can they refuse admission to a child whose parent refuses to provide them. But if a parent prefere to buy school booka outright, so that they may remain the property of the child, there is nothing to prevent his buying them from the managers, or the managers gelling them to him, as a purely voluntary arrangement and a matter of mutual convenience. Truly a moßt remarkable change has come over the face of things educational in Great Britain .ataee most of our older colonists left the Old Land, but it is a change they will all hail with delight, and the result of it will be that the disgrace of not being able to read or write—a disability too often found among the lower classes of the English people—will be totally wiped out in the next generation, and for ever after.