27

H.—ll,

dinners with them, some arrangement of a similar kind should be made. Such children should not be allowed to leave the school ground without permission from the teacher, who should make some arrangement for their proper supervision during his own absence. I have too much reason to believe that in one case a serious evil has resulted from the absence of any such supervision. Corporal Punishment. —Certain occurrences during the past year convince me that it is highly desirable, if not absolutely necessary, that the Board should establish some principle upon which corporal punishment should be administered in their schools. The hardening and brutalizing effect of the frequent and indiscriminate application of this kind of punishment is universally admitted: at the same time very few will be bold enough to assert that it can be entirely discarded. There will always be a few unruly spirits whom no other mode of punishment will control; but, at the same time, it may be confidently asserted that any boy who cannot be subdued without frequent applications of the cane, is unfit to associate with the bulk of his schoolmates, and, in fact, places himself in the class for which such wise provision has been made in clause 87 of the Act, and that any pupil w*ho cannot be made to conform to the discipline of the school without frequent resort to corporal punishment should bo expelled, as provided for in the clause alluded to. At the same time, there are cases where this punishment, wisely and dispassionately administered, will have the very best effect —frequently that of completely changing for the better the disposition, or at any rate the behaviour, of its object. By these considerations I have been induced to draw up a*few regulations upon this important matter, and I would further venture to suggest that, if adopted, the teacher who keeps himself strictly within the bounds prescribed shall, in the event of his being the object of any legal proceedings in connection with this part of his duty, be indemnified by the Board for any loss he may thereby sustain. The very knowledge that this will be done will probably diminish the chances of such proceedings being taken, since they are too frequently resorted to out of a feeling of spite, and for the express purpose of inflicting pecuniary loss upon the teacher. Promotion in Standards.—By the present regulations teachers are compelled to advance to a higher standard any scholar who passes, however barely, the standard in which he is examined. Now, in view of the self-evident truth that the mental capacities of children are as various as their physical constitutions, it is reasonable to expect that in all schools, but especially in large schools, there will be some scholars who are positively unable to keep pace with the rest of their class; yet, if such pupils happen to pass, they must, according to existing regulations, be presented in a higher standard at the following examination. As a matter of principle the instruction given to any class must be suited to the capacities of the bulk of the class, and, as in these days of competition and emulation teachers' reputations are to a certain extent staked upon the results they produce, there is a growing feeling that to be compelled to promote pupils who are evidently much inferior in capacity to the rest of their class is to incur the discredit of certain failure in the case of such "pupils, which it is unjust that they should suffer, at the same time that it is prejudicial to the true interests of the scholars so promoted. It seems to me only reasonable that something should be left to the discretion of the teacher, and that in such cases it should be permissible for a teacher to retain exceptionally backward scholars in the same standards for a part or the whole of the following year, provided that the permission of the Inspector be first obtained, who, from his knowledge of the performance of each scholar at the examination, would be able to judge whether such a course would be advisable in the interests of the scholars themselves, and could give or withhold his consent accordingly. Before the establishment of the present system your Board's regulations provided for such cases, and permission was occasionally given to retain scholars in their old standards. Now, however, it only remains for the Inspector to conform as strictly as possible to the regulations framed for his guidance, and no such relief is possible, but when the time arrives for a revision of the existing regulations it is to be hoped that some provision for such cases will be introduced. Uniformity of Examinations. —To the modern system of bringing all elementary education under a strict uniformity of operation no doubt many objections may be urged, such, for instance, as the strong inducement held out to teachers to ignore education in its true sense, and to aim at results, and nothing but results. As, however, it has been adopted in all parts of the world pretending to any advancement in civilization, it must be presumed, and, indeed, there is no doubt, that its advantages by far outweigh its disadvantages. But the uniformity to which so many and some sound objections have been made will be very much more objectionable if it be only apparent, and not, as nearly as may be, absolute ; inasmuch as the inferences drawn from the returns forwarded to the department must necessarily be, not merely unreliable, but positively and mischievously misleading. In any system of elementary education such as that now prevailing in Now Zealand, it is above everything important that the Minister of Education should be in a position to compare the quality of the work done in any one school or district with that in any other. At present, no doubt, very wide differences exist between the methods of examination followed by the several Inspectors, not only in their interpretations of the standards, but in their methods of marking, or otherwise recording the value of, the work of the scholars examined. As long as this is the case, the Minister of Education may read in one report that 90 per cent, of the scholars in a certain standard passed, and in another that 70 per cent, passed in the same standard ; but he will be as much in the dark as to the relative efficiency of the schools in the two districts as though nothing whatever had been said upou the subject: nay, he may be absolutely deceived, since it is quite possible that the district showing the lower percentage might be in a higher state of efficiency than the other. This is only one instance of the erroneous impressions that might be conveyed to the mind of the Minister and of the public at large by the perusal of the several Boards' reports ; and for this, at any rate, it appears to me that a remedy might easily be found. The following is a sketch of a scheme by which the annual result examinations might be brought to a nearer approximation to uniformity, and the risk of doing an injustice to any teachers reduced to a minimum. The result examinations, for obvious reasons, should be arranged to terminate as nearly as possible at the end of the year. A set of "pattern" papers, for each subject and every standard, should be prepared annually at the department and forwarded to the Inspectors. The patterns should show the number and nature of the questions to be framed by the Inspector, together with the number