INSPECTORS AND INSPECTION OF SCHOOLS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXIV, Issue 10508, 30 July 1897, Page 6

INSPECTORS AND INSPECTION OF SCHOOLS.

TO THE EDITOR. Sib,— have just received from the Government printer the reports of inspectors of schools for last year, and after an evening spent in reading them, I should like to submit a few points to your readers'attention, which struck me as of some importance. The great subject of composition engaged the attention of all of them. Our inspectors, tor teaching it, order the "reproduction of a story," a method Messrs. Bindon and Milne, the Wanganui inspectors, consider as follows :— We think the reproduction of a story read by the teacher a valueless kind of exercise." Again, our Board has " for the guidance of its teachevs" issued a book compiled by tho late Mr. O'Sullivan, in which occurs the following expression on the same subject :— There is only one way to teach composition. Ask a child for his own natural talk. Do not manacle him with reproduction and the like imbecilities." How our teaohers follow such contradictory guidances, or that they should be asked to do it, appears to me very perplexing. The Board should suppress one of its two' instructions at anyrate. Again, our Board has issued " instructions" that some standards should be able to write themes on 25 different subjects covering from 15 to 20 lines of foolscap, to be done before a pass can be got, with not more than two syntactical or orthographical errors, with no faulty endings or linked sentences, etc. That sort ot method the four Otago inspectors, Messrs. Gozen, Fitzgerald, Richardson, und,, Bossence, fouud by experience to lie disappointing in result. They write:—" Teachers have felt hampered by the necessity of preparing 25 subjects, and they and we have been frequently disappointed with the compositions written on these subjects. The instruction to prepare 25 subjects is therefore withdrawn. That method, discarded in Otago, the land of its birth, has been foisted upon our teachers without allowing them the slightest demur; and it has not been, in its',' disappointing results," different here from Otago, so far as I can learn. After the example of the Otago Board and inspector our Board should not hesitate to follow suit; for surely the discarded methods of Otago are not less unsuitable or barren there than here, Our inspectors draw marked attention to the abnormally large number ot teachers on the sick list, the largest, in all New Zealand; md they strongly urge on the Board the necessity of holding an enquiry into the cause; and from «ome things that have come under my notice I heartily support that wish ot theirs, both in the. interests of humanity as well as education. Bearing on results I was not surprised to find that our inspectors report that" while there was an increase of 890 pupils examined in standards last year, yet there was a decrease of 295 in the number that passed compared with the previous year." This, too, ought to be enquired into by the proper authorities.—l am, etc., A Female Teacher,