IMPROVEMENT OF SCHOOL WORK.

Timaru Herald, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 12869, 3 January 1906, Page 6

IMPROVEMENT OF SCHOOL WORK.

-■■ One of Charles Reade's heroines says, " mother was, an ideal woman; she -taught me three rarities—attention, observation, and accuracy." Why rarities? iisks Dr. F. Trubyi King, The judicious cultivation of these faculties, neglected and almost entirely left out of account in our ordinary practice of 'education, even where nominally provided for, says Dr. King, would do more to advance; the;interests of the farming community than any other measure. "We are the .-fortunate, owners of a country which embraces within a small compass a; wider and more important -range:.'.'of geological and climatic variations useful .to man than any other country in the world—a country of infinite potentialities. There is almost no limit to degree to which oor resources could be tended and developed; if, we had arising generation trained in the exercise .observation, and accuracy to calling in the senses and £he reasoning faculties to direct their mantfal: "work, and able to keep pace in •;;witli- the trend of advances which made at the thinking centres of the, world in the" systematic devel : •opment of the" practice of--fanning! - There is nothing formidable,, complex, or difficult 1 to understand inutile "practical, application of modern scientific:; ideas. 1 " .• Everything needed would be well-Vtritlun fthe compass of our average ; youths; had the necessary faculties cultivated at school, instead of being crammed with a vast amount of scholastic detail which is as distasteful to themselves as it is useless in practical life. We want to humanize.the school, and we want to "humanize our country life. Professor Robertson says : " The appalling waste of child life, in thousands of .our rural schools in Canada is little less than a crime against humanity.- . . We have a lot of people who are mentally starved, who are thin in their interests because they have not beeji given the chance to identify their thoughts with the interesting things that are about them all the while. That port of their nature has not been cultivated. In theielemeritary schools a "boy's faculties and pWers should be so quickened and trained that, when he grows to be a man and follows agriculture, he will.do it in a masterful /intelligent way as a man should, not in a hind-like, animal .way." Those of us engaged in trying to advance agricultural knowledge and practice find ourselves handicapped, nob by what can -fairly be called the stupidity of the farmer, but by the stupidity of the system which has neither habituated nor fitted him to think or actalong the lines of modern progress.