Page 100
1
various races, should be set on foot without delay.
We endorse the principle of more pay for more work, in preference
It would dispel the to the present system of semi-automatic promotion.
self-satisfied and apathetic air of many teachers, who feel they have reached secure positions from which no substantial pay rise is possible. But we emphasise that the work of selection should assigned to an impartia
board and not left in effect to the heads of schools.
The second main proposal in the report (pp. 41-2), is for
increasing pupils' fees, to double primary school fees, and to increase secondary school fees by 25%, on the grounds that the former have stood
Conformably with this, it still for 11 years, and the latter for three.
is stated (pp.18 top and 22 top), that the present is a time of generally
rising costs. But unless you can show that the rising costs are
accompanied by rising incomes of parents, this is not an argument for,
but an admission against. Nothing whatever is said about these incomes, of which the commission probably knew nothing. This again shows
the economic weakness of the report. The consequence of this report
can only be to impose the greatest hardshop on countless poor parents
of families, because it is probably true in general, and certainly true in many cases, that wages and salaries are not increasing nearly as fast as living costs. Our use of the word "probably" is necessiated by the
primitive but stipp up-to-date fact that owing to culpable government
omission an official cost-of-living index for the Colony has only just
been introduced and is not apparently to be reviewed quarterly.
Elsewhere in the report the ultimate aim of free primary education is
envisaged. Increasing fees is certainly moving in the opposite direction
and therefore needs more excuse then a general reference to rising costs.
There is however, a cogent, if unintentional, argument in the report against the increase of fees. The report shows (p.15 at seq.)
that from 1958 to 1963 expenditure on education incre⚫sed at a not much greater rate than total Colony expenditure, (155% as against 142%); this Page 100ft44hstanding the exceptional circumstances of the 6063fgħive,
- 3 -