THE SCHOOL-BOARD.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
SIR,—As a member of the Committee of the School Board for the Division of Greenwich, will you allow me a few words in reply to the letter of the Rev. Ll. Davies?
1. I think, with due deference to Mr. Davies's high character aud authority, that the remission of school fees hardly cornea under the definition of the relief of distress ; enforcing their payment on families already living (" not living, but starving," as one woman put it) on insufficient food, seems to me to be increasing distress.
2. Of the three obstacles to school attendance, the first—" in- sufficient clothing "—is surely an additional argument for remis- sion, or free education of some sort ; the second, "occupation at home or earning wages," is not a question of fees at all. Such eases can only be dealt with, as a rule, by making the children half-timers ; and there ought to be a Board School in every poor and populous district, at which arrangements are made for the re- ception of such, say, for girls in the afternoon and boys in the evening. Concerning the third obstacle, the refractoriness of the children, little need be said. It will decrease with its cause, the supineness of the parents, which the School Board is already deal- ing with so successfully, and the police might easily be called in to aid by dealing with the really refractory as vagrants.
3. It may have a very good effect on careless parents to be made to pay id. a week, but poverty, not carelessness, is the plea for remission.
4. Parents who could afford to pay might apply to the Committee, but, allowing for a few cases of successful imposture, need not obtain remission.
5. and 6. may be answered in one. There has been no exception to the willingness of the parents to send their children to the Board Schools in this district, nor is it likely that the difficulty will arise elsewhere. And wherever there is a district "containing many of the most indigent families" in which there is no Board School, let there be one.
7. Mr. Davies would leave to private charity, what private charity has failed and what the School Board was created specially to accomplish,—the education of the poor.—I am,
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