XU. SOUTH AFRICAN ASSOCIATION FOR ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE. 



regard to compulsory attendance even if no application has been 

 made by the Board for such a proclamation," and by Section 68, 

 " in view of the provision of the preceding section it shall be the 

 duty of the first school board of the district to provide school accom- 

 modation before the expiry of its term of office for all such children 

 in its district as may be required in accordance with this Act 

 to be attending school ; and it shall be lawful for a school board to 

 incur expenditure for the conveyance to school of children who 

 reside at a greater distance than three miles from the school." 



By Section 69 powers are given to a school board under certain 

 conditions to make school attendance compulsory for other than 

 children of European extraction — that is, natives and coloured 

 children. 



By Section 72 it is provided that any excess of expenditure 

 over income shall be divided equally between the Education Depart- 

 ment out of funds for that purpose voted by Parliament, and the 

 other half shall be met by a special rate, which may be either an 

 owner's rate or an owner's and tenant's rate combined. 



Now, as half the white population of South Africa reside at 

 present within the Cape Colony, the working of this first school 

 board Act is bound to exercise a profound influence on the future 

 educational policy of the whole country, and the next four or five 

 years are likely to determine what course it will take, whether it is 

 to be a policy of progress, or one of retrogression. A policy of 

 progress, of course, will aim at keeping children at school much 

 longer than is the average rule at present, and at providing 

 facilities for every promising child continuing his or her education 

 up to the doors of the university, and beyond. Even without know- 

 ing anything about the statistics, everyone must have been struck 

 by the early age at which boys and girls leave school in South Africa. 

 In many cases this is presumably done in order that the children may 

 begin to earn wages as soon as possible ; in other cases probably 

 owing to sheer ignorance or indifference on the part of their parents. 

 In any case it is a very short-sighted proceeding, even from the 

 lowest economical point of view ; for it is almost certain that a boy 

 of 12 or 1-3 leaving school at that early age in order to go into an 

 office or store, or to work on a farm, will have earned a smaller total 

 sum by the time he is 20, than if he had remained at school a few 

 years longer ; whilst for the whole of his subsequent career he is 

 almost inevitably doomed to the least remunerative forms of 

 employment. 



It would be a useful work if the South African Association for 

 the Advancement of Science were to compile statistics, as far as 

 obtainable, of the comparative wages earned during succes- 

 sive age periods by different classes of white labour in this 

 country, and to reduce these figures to curves on a dia- 

 gram (similar to that presented to the American Society of 



