E.—lb

52

As to the means for improving composition in our schools, it is a well-known fact that the child who reads much writes well. This furnishes us at once with a plea for more school libraries of the right sort, and for more silent reading (with the aid of a dictionary, if necessary) in the upper standards. More systematic correlation of composition with the other standard subjects is to be commended; complete correlation is, of course, impossible, and, we may add, undesirable. Intelligence should be cultivated in the reading lesson, too —less by the dry-as-dust method of explaining isolated words and phrases than by seeing that the whole contents of a passage is being thoroughly grasped and retained. There should also be exercises to increase the range and variety of the child's vocabulary, and that, too, from the beginning of school life. Formal analysis and synthesis should not be restricted to answering the questions on test-cards, but should receive practical application in the written composition. There should be in all standards more practice in the oral reproduction of lessons; and that this exercise may tax the constructive ability of the child, the continual intervention of the teacher in suggestive questions is to be avoided. To meet the wants of those children who are not encouraged to read at home, and to some extent of others also, the teacher need not be afraid to give his pupils interesting accounts of the chief events taking place outside their limited horizon. Finally, in this, as in all other schoolwork, success can come only as the result of plans skilfully laid and rigorously carried out. Speaking generally, we can say that the reading in our schools shows some improvement in expression, fluency, and volume. This we attribute to the larger amount of practice in the art consequent on the use of supplementary readers. Nevertheless comparatively few children, even in the higher classes, read in their natural tone of voice. Frequently the pitch is unnaturally high, and, except in a limited number of schools, articulation and phrasing are still faulty. But, though we believe that in regard to the mechanical parts of the subject some advance has been made, we are convinced that the educative value of the reading-lesson has not yet been fully realised by many of our teachers. It is not unusual to find a teacher conducting a lesson in, say, arithmetic, while the members of another class "go on reading." Such a teacher, it is apparent, does not appreciate the potency of the reading-lesso.n as an educative instrument, nor has he learned that during its progress it will brook no sharing with any other subject of his attention, energies, and resource. There has been a tendency on the part of some teachers to pay much less attention than formerly to spelling, but in the majority of schools the spelling generally, and particularly words in common use, has received considerable attention. The intelligent use of word-building has greatly aided the work in this exercise, especially in the lower classes. A fuller extension of this principle to the teaching of spelling in the higher classes is again urged on teachers. The desirableness of employing pupils in the solution of practical problems in arithmetic likely to be met with in after-life, and free from undue complexity, is gaining recognition among teachers. But there is still an undue amount of time spent in mere mechanical operations, and many teachers cannot make up their minds to limit the work in the lower classes to the range of the numbers specified. The obviously and grotesquely wrong answers which are handed in not only to the Inspectors on examination-day, but to the teacher in the ordinary course of work, surely suggests that children should be encouraged to give a few minutes' thought to a problem before beginning to solve it, and especially in the upper classes, to make rough mental approximations by way of testing results. Except in a very few instances, we have little evidence that this suggestion has come home to teachers. In our annual report of last year we noted that, in a good many cases, common weights and measures had apparently no connection with realities. Though we believe that this reproach has been in some degree removed, we would again strongly advise that the foot-rule, tape-line, imitation coins, quart-pot, scales and weights, be still more extensively use for practical and illustrative purposes. With reference to the teaching of geography, we last year alluded to the lack of sufficient evidence of actual appeal to nature. Our experience during the year just ended constrains us to report that in many cases at least our suggestions have been less fruitful than we hoped. The real aims of geographical teaching, and the value of the subject as a potent instrument by which the pupils' powers of judging and reasoning may be developed are often entirely lost sight of, with the result that the total educative outcome of the teacher's efforts, as tested on examinationday, is miserably inadequate to the time given to the subject. It is expressly laid down that the instruction in Course A should be based as far as possible on observation and experiment—that it is, in fact, a division of nature-study, and should be treated as such. Nevertheless, we too often find that young children whose elementary geographical notions should be acquired from a study of their immediate surroundings, are condemned to the painful memorising and souldeadening repetition of (to them) meaningless definitions. For the more effective teaching of the subject many schools are now equipped with appliances of various kinds —the shadow pole, the altometer, barometer, modelling-tray, globe, &c. Still the conviction is being forced on us that in too many cases the early enthusiasm for a rational treatment of geography exhausted itself in the effort of constructing or procuring the apparatus. For certainly the appliances are not being used systematically (not unfrequently a piece of apparatus, when demanded by the Inspector, emerges from its hiding-place, bearing a suspiciously thick accumulation of dust), and even where the length of the shadow or altitude of the sun is regularly recorded, we too often find that the pupils are unable to say why the little experiments are made, or what lessons are to be learned therefrom. Weather-records are in many schools faithfully kept, but quite insufficient use is made of the mass of material so gathered. Many teachers still make a fetish of the text-book, and fail to realise that the teaching of geography has now assumed scientific form. The results of the teaching in Course B geography, in many of the smaller schools especially, are little more encouraging than in the case of Course A. The readers are "gone through," but