It therefore seems desirable that some help should be given to post-primary schools. The Committee makes no specific recommendation[2] how this should be done, although it is emphatically of the opinion that there is a need for this help, and that the personality of those doing the work is of more importance than the question as to which organization should control them.
This is only the immediate step. Everything possible should be done to restore the community bond between teacher, parent, and child—by the stabilizing of the teaching service, by the provision of houses for teachers in newly developed areas, and by continuing the effort to increase the number of women in the service.
(2) Co-education
At the hearing of the immorality charges in the Court at Lower Hutt the prosecuting officer attributed the delinquency, in part, to the association of boys and girls in co-educational schools. This directed the attention of the Committee to the effect on morality of the propinquity of the sexes in schools.
There seemed to be no disagreement on the question of educating boys and girls of primary-school age together. The desirability of co-education at the post-primary school level, however, was frequently disputed. Many opinions were heard, for and against.
The Committee was not concerned with the relative values of the different types of school, except in so far as they had an effect on juvenile delinquency.
Statements were made that co-educational schools did, in fact, increase the chances of immorality, but although the Committee investigated these charges it could not find that acts of immorality among pupils did in fact arise from their association at school.
There was evidence that one girl had incited seven boys to sexual misbehaviour on the way home from a co-educational school. Thorough investigation proved to the Committee that the group came from the same neighbourhood and had become known to one another from their home and street association. Acts of indecency had occurred long before they went to the post-primary school.
Senior pupils of an intermediate school were concerned in depravity, both heterosexual and homosexual. The trouble probably spread through the acquaintanceships made at school, but in all cases the history of the instigators, in intelligence and environment, showed either that they were already concerned in immoral acts outside the school or that they had home circumstances conducive to delinquency.
In many of the cases that were brought to the notice of the Committee the name of the school was associated with the offender, even although the offences did not occur within the school or arise from it. This linking of the school with the offender is unfortunate, as it is unsettling to the other pupils of the school and disturbing to the parents of the district.