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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 83

To the Editor of the "Timaru Herald."

To the Editor of the "Timaru Herald."

Sir,—I assume at starting I am a parvenu or an unknown person no one can take umbrage at my styling myself thusly, and with your permission I would give my crude ideas to the public of New Zealand, so as, if feasible, to strengthen the hands of the present Government, who, I am led to believe, intend to curtail the excessive expenditure on education in this colony. We are, Sir, in my opinion, educated to extremity. It's generally admitted (and I plead guilty to the impeachment) that I have "a goodly heritage" in the way of children, but I cannot see why those who have not many or any olive branches should contribute to the teaching of mine. I fail, Sir, to see the grand effects of educating the masses we were once informed would be the outcome of our State schools. Great Britian has made gigantic strides to teach everybody, and what is the result? England proper is anything but comfortable. Her manufacturies and various industries languish. Scotland, I grant, produces a number of cannie or shrewd people; they were that always. Ireland the land of modern pre-eminent education, produces a crowd of discontented, disaffected, disloyal folk. To what are we to attribute these results? Why, Sir, I say to education. Our lunatic asylums are filled with educated people, the hospitals have their quota, educated public-house loafers are not altogether uncommon, and I need not inform you that educated obstructionists occupy seats in our Houses of Parliament. Your own pen asserts this fact daily, that some are anything but what they ought to be. Sir, I would have every person pay for the higher culture of their own children. It is monstrous to suppose that the children of some one who, perhaps through accident, gets located in a large town are to have almost a classical education, whilst those of another party, who elects the country, get only a modicum of instruction. Yet the latter contributes equally to the general fund. I have, Sir, the impression on my brain, it may be erroneous, that we are over-educated, spoon fed, in fact, with instruction. For example, an advertisement appears in a paper requiring a clerk, and behold dozens of applicants are forthcoming. I argue, Sir, some one must guide the plough and through that means comes our living by the land, and it only gives us sustenance. Ploughmen are not generally required to decline propositions from Euclid. For goodnesss sake do try and repress this excessive education mania. We cannot be all clerks, clerymen, doctors, lawyers, etc., some one, I repeat, must steer the plough.

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The old hackneyed idea that education represses crime is, I say, effete, obsolete, played out in fact. Read the records of our criminal Courts. Who are the people who embezzle, forge, and such like? Certainly the educated. The recent Dewar affair at Dunedin is supposed, and I believe justly, to have been done by an educated scoundrel. Sir, I assert that in the matter of education we are playing with an edged-tool. My advice is, and I give it to the country gratuitously, to allow the State to teach our children to read and write fairly; then let the parents expend as much as they please in the higher walks of learning. And as the Government are beset with monetary difficulties, why, let them sell the greater part of the reserves for education, and all the church ones, pay off some of our liabilities, and New Zealand will recover from her nightmare incubus—namely, education and religion—and prosper.—I am, &c.,

A. Henry Heatley.

Woodbury,