Page:The empire and the century.djvu/624

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CONTROL OF SCHOOLS
581

race. The second class of schools was the result of more ample experience on the part of administrators as to the deterioration which both white and black races undergo through undue and ill-defined association with one another. It is noteworthy that some of the latest statistics for Cape Colony give the percentage of scholars in mission schools who are below standard (i.e., in the infant classes) as 64, while in the schools for aborigines the percentage is only 52. In both cases the number of older scholars who are in the infant classes is quite abnormal, and this, coupled with other depressing features of these schools (such as the low standard of training of the teachers), makes the educational statistics of Cape Colony appear less satisfactory upon the whole than they would appear if only the white scholars were under consideration. There is no doubt that, in the past, the admixture of coloured children with white has been one of the chief causes tending to arrest the mental development of the latter. The enrolment of scholars in mission schools and schools for aborigines for the third quarter of 1865 sufficiently indicates the small beginnings of the new system: in 'Government' and 'aided public' schools, 4,908; in 'aided mission' schools, 16,723; in 'aborigines' schools, 2,302. The corresponding figures for 1904 are 49,109, 53,584, and 38,768 respectively. It should be noted that this distribution or classes of schools according to races is also largely a geographical distribution.

The control of schools has always been a vexed and complicated matter, and nowhere more so than in South Africa. If a third cause were to be named, side by side with the configuration of the country and the admixture of coloured races, to account for the slow progress of education in that country, there could be no hesitation in saying that denominational rivalries have been a principal obstacle in the way of an efficient national system of schools. The influence of those rivalries has been increased by the fact that the principal line of Church cleavage between the white settlers is the