35

E.—lb.

Besides the 2,929 children due for examination in the standards, 1,596, having an average age of seven years, were presented as infants not yet fit to be examined in Standard I. This seems a large proportion to be below the requirements of Standard 1., but I find that it is no larger than the proportion of infants in most of the other education districts. Except in the larger schools and in a few of the smaller ones, this class is sadly neglected. To teach thirty or forty children divided into five or six classes is of course no easy matter, and few teachers succeed in doing it well; but the difficulty would be found much less formidable were about ten minutes out of every thirty of the school-day set aside for the supervision of classes doing silent work in desks, and about five of the ten minutes invariably given to the infant class. Where the lessons are of thirty minutes' duration the general rule should be : teach about twenty minutes and supervise about ten. Beading.—l cannot, I regret to say, report much improvement in the method of teaching this subject. It is still too commonly taught as if mere ability to utter the words of the book were the only thing to be aimed at. Measured by the standard of verbal fluency, the reading is tolerably satisfactory, though even here distinctness of utterance is the exception rather than the rule. Very little heed is paid to the stops given in the text, and still less to logical pauses. The pupila read right on as if only solicitous to finish as quickly as possible the sentence or two assigned to them. The same faults are common in the recitation of poetry. Spelling and Wbiting.—These are now the two strongest subjects of the whole school-course. In many schools the writing is excellent, and in very few is it really bad. The mistakes most frequently met with are errors in points of junction of the hook and the link, in the width and length of the loop, and in the relative heights and lengths of the t, h, d, &c. In my view, so long as children write in copy-books, vce cannot be too particular in insisting upon their imitating every detail of the head-lines. In many schools the home-exercise books are models of neatness. Aeithmetic.—This is a very easy subject to teach so long as neither teacher nor examiner goes beyond mere rules; but difficult when general principles are dealt with by the teacher and examined in by the Inspector. Most of my questions were problems, and were not to be answered by mere rule. They required for their solution a knowledge of principles, and were therefore generally poorly answered. Instead of divide 53,228 by 7, the question ran :If 53,228 marbles be divided amongst 7 boys, how many marbles will each boy get ? Instead of subtract the sum of £19 6s. lid. aud £8 3s. lOd. from £40, the question ran: If a man had £40 and spent £19 6s. lid. in one shop and £8 3s. lOd. in another, how much would he have left ? and so on. The form of these questions differed from the form of those the children had been accustomed to ; and, ignorant of the principles of the rules they had learnt, a large number of them broke down. Teachers would do well to attend to the excellent suggestions made by Mr. Habens in the annotated standards. There is a great lack of thoroughgoing black-board instruction in this subject. Geammae.—Like arithmetic, this subject is difficult to teach if the teacher aims at anything above the merely mechanical. Generally it may be said that the children should not be allowed to enter upon the grammar of a sentence the import of the language of which they do not understand. I invariably select the passage for parsing from the reading-book of the class : the language of the books is seldom understood ; and, as might have been expected, the percentage of failures in this subject is very high. The composition was generally worse done than the parsing. There is an abundance of time devoted to essays, letter-writing, reproduction, and so on, to make very fair composers of the pupils; but the method of correcting these exercises, though very laborious, is so ineffective that the time is spent almost in vain. My experience has now taught me that it is well nigh useless to suggest remedies in a general report, for those teachers that most need help are precisely those that pay least attention to what is said. At the risk, however, of wribing in vain, I shall indicate briefly what appears to me to be an intelligent method of correcting the composition exercise. (1.) Let the exercise be done in an exercise-book. (2.) Collect the books and examine the exercise out of school-hours, carefully underlining every error, and transferring two or three examples of each kind of error to a notebook. (3.) On the following day transfer the errors from the note-book to the black-board (and this should be done either before school assembles in the morning, or during the dinner recess). (4.) Make these errors the subject of the day's grammar lesson; after which distribute the books, and cause the children to correct their own errors. (5.) Be-examine the exercise to see that this has been well done. (6.) Do not make the criticisms personal. The errors are made by the class, and should be treated as such. Geography.—ln a large number of schools this subject is but poorly known and poorly taught. It is really painful to watch some teachers give what they are pleased to dignify by the term lesson— now peering into the text-book for the facts, and now groping about the map in search of the place about which the facts are stated. This kind of work is, of course, utterly inexcusable, for any man that will take the trouble to work up and arrange the facts can give a very fair lesson in geography. Our better teachers teach the subject from maps drawn by themselves on the black-board. Of course a class will have a much more exalted notion of the man that can rapidly sketch out his own map, and fill in the details of the lesson from a full mind, than of the man that knows less of the subject than themselves. History.—There is not much real teaching in history, but there is a good deal of effort made to work up the text-book, and with tolerably fair success. Object-Lessons and Elementary Science.—Object-lessons are now given in most schools; but, except in a few, very ineffectively. There is too much of the pouring-in process, and not enough of the drawing-out—in a word, the lessons are not made educative. With respect to elementary science, the general complaint made by teachers is want of apparatus. To me this appears to be a confession of ignorance, for any man with a sound knowledge of (he subjects named under Regulation 12 can do more good work with rough apparatus improvised by himself than with the elaborate sets of apparatus made up by the instrument-makers at Home. Children can easily imitate the teacher's rough handiwork, and will become experimenters themselves, but they will never attempt to imitate the perfect article of the instrument-maker. Hitherto no marks have been assigned for excellence in