Suicide or Farming!

Frightful Alternatives for Fiji-Indian Schoolboy

From Our Own Correspondent A M T , SUVA. May 17 N Indian schoolboy recently wrote to the Fiji Education Department to say that if the Department did not admit him to the Teacher’s Training College (which is already jammed full) he was left with the choice between suicide and farming.

This letter was quoted by the acting Director of Education (Mr. F. R. J Davies) in an address to the annual con ference of the Fiji Teachers’ Union, an Indian organisation.

Mr. Davies’s address followed a speech by the president of the union (Mr. Hari Charan) who said that while there were 14,000 Indian children at school, there were 17,000 Indians of school age with out schooling.

Getting on to somewhat familiar ground, Mr. Charan said that more Indian schools, more teachers, and more scholarships and bursaries for training teachers overseas were required.

Mr. Davies advised the conference (of 200 Indian teachers) to remember Fiji’s economic facts. In 1948 the proposed expenditure on education amounted to more than £250,000, and he isaid he hoped that the teachers who were asking for higher pay would sd[sk themselves what they were doing to raise the earn ing capacity of the people who were paying their salaries.

He said that Indian children were sent to school not so much to obtain a liberal education as to enable them to get away from the land and take their places with “white-collar” employees.

Mr. Davies quoted the boy who bracketed suicide with (farming and added that Fiji could hold only a limited number of “white-collar” workers.

Children, he said, should be taught to want to do something useful. In Fiji the most useful thing to be done was the growing or processing of food.