"MUDDLE AND CRAM."

Taranaki Herald, Volume LV, Issue 13928, 11 June 1909, Page 1

"MUDDLE AND CRAM."

A WSINKSS MAN'S REPLY

A very Mgorous attack on tho English educational s>stom is made by Mrs. Klinn Close, who seems to have given a Siood deal ot attention to the subject. ■'Muddk' arid cram" is lior summing up of tlic <-y<,toin Children, she declares, are too oiton bewildered with seventeen , subjects and not thoroughly grounded j in any one of them. What is the K°°d of teaching country labourers' children how silk, lead pencils and cocoa are manufactured, and other children a list of twenty rivers in Hindustan? In London she has heard elaborate lessons on tbr Gob) desert, which a teacher declared "exactly resembled the central plains of England!" and in the worst slums saw jiirls parsing "Hamlet" and readme French aloud in such a manner as to l«» quite unintelligible. She has soon inrls of the working class spending wicks over the analysis of an egg io several places of decimals, which no one understood. Ono item was "mineral matter 00.03," uliich led some of the Kills to tell bor that an ogn was a mineral containing decimals. She has also soon poor girls put to clean grates in which fires are never lighted, and knives that are never used. At a neighbouring cookery centre I found three teachers instructing two girls in the making of Irish stow. It was fine, excellent, appetising stew, and there wore six dishes of it. 1 asked what became of it, and was told that it wont into tho swill-tub, because the girls wore not allowed to oat it and the people of the neighborhood would not take it as a gift. The statement was so inconceivable that I was resolved to have a witness. I sent the motor oar for mv husband. He came down and actually saw tho six dishes thrown into the swill-tub." An inmate of an orphan homo who passed the Cambridge higher examination was visitod hv MVs. Close in her quarters in a London shop. The visitor saw thoro a cand!o stuck in a boot v bread and butter wrapped in a dirty '"newspaper, and a cup of !>ndlv-mado ton. Mrs. Close has sta\od at a farmhouso botwoon Didcot and Knmdon in which not a single article placed on tho table was grown in the pardon or on tho farm. She found on the tabjo Danish but cor. tinned poachov. cake in a box from Edinburgh, colonial moat. The girls, she found, could not niako a cake or preseivo or stow the gooseliorrios and currants with which tho garden was fillod. And tho milk came out of n Swiss milk tin ! The education authorities, in reply, m\v that Mrs. Close is wrong in her facts and hor conclusions. "1 feet dozens of such letters from similarly misifri' formed critics ovi-ry week," says an expert of note, "and I put thorn in the waste-paper basket " The London County Council authorities contend that complete and practical domestic instruction is gi\«>n to children, and the curriculum as published in the Daily Mail, soonis convincing on this point. But inquiiies mfloV by the Daily Mail anjoin T business people reveal a «"nou« di'Miti-ifartion with the results • f the general sytem of education, a dissatisfaction curiously resembling that expressed )>v some New Zealand '•usinosi men. They aro struck by the inalu'litv of tho avorngo boy of fourteen or fifteen tn speak plainly nnd write oorroctlv. "After seven yoars at school Mi" average I ondon boy slouches into I i business office or warehouse, mnmbInic? or siienking through his closed I t«eth. unable correctly to copy fin address >ipon nu envelope, or to carr^ i mo«ni'o intelligently from ono department to another If such a boy can bo encouraged to go to evening classes he may sometimes (says this business mini Ueeomo a rival of tho boy who has been tn n higher grade school, but in all the essentials which he might have acquired easily enough in his elementary school ho is strangely lacking." Tho bead of a college that prepares hnv<t for business bouses and tho ciril ■service ay« that 90 per cent, of the Soys fro'n London council schools are deficient in m»arly every subject taught at the schools. A Daily Mail representative who examined the work of a, "•nr' v cr c r ofxrirlidato* reports that in | veiir'v every case the handwriting waa noor and in every caso tho spelling : n»cciirate. while tho arithmetic papers wore pot satisfactory. Mr Harold Gorst, | «on of «;ir John Gnrst. nnd secretary I to his fcther when his father was tho bond of tho Education Department. ' soorjis to bo t)io most ratTical reformer of all 110 think* tho sooner primary scbool.i nre pulled down and an entirely now svstom instituted the hotter for tho nation.