We greatly regret to learn that the Board of Education
has intimated to the Kent Education Committee that rifle. shooting is not a subject which it will permit to be taught to children in elementary schools. The Board, therefore, requests that no further education of this nature shall be given in the Eynsford and Shoreham schools at the conclusion of the twelve months during which it was decided to carry out rifle-shooting as an experiment. The same prohibition will no doubt be applied to the five other schools which were allowed by the Department to try similar experiments. We can understand the Minister of Education refusing to make rifle-shooting obligatory in schools, but we are bound to con- fess that it seems to us a very extreme measure to force local authorities to give up the teaching of rifle-shooting although they are anxious to carry it out. Here is surely a case in which the Government's avowed principle of local co»troi ought to prevail. Can it be that the will of the local authority is only to be carried out when it is in accordance with the will of the central Government ? As there is no appeal from the Department, and as its power is absolute in the matter, all we can do is to register our protest against a policy so narrow and so illiberal. The notion that a boy is injured from the moral point of view and turned into a bloodthirsty ruffian by learning to handle a rifle is too grotesque for argument.
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