E.—ls

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so on with each class of vegetable in turn. It would probably be found that boys would select the seed sown, and only sow from good samples ; the effects of various manures would also be watched. Judging by accounts from Canada and the United States, the farmers in the neighbourhood of the schools generally take great interest in such experiments. Several teachers showed commendable energy in working up exhibits of handwork for the Marlborough Industrial Exhibition, and the outcome of their efforts provided a valuable object-lesson to visiting teachers and pupils. Classes for teachers in brushwork and first aid and ambulance, began in the latter half of the year. Classes in other subjects are in contemplation. Receipts on behalf of classes operating under the Manual and Technical Instruction Act amount to £12 Is. 9d. for material, and £12 3s. 4d. for capitation. The amended regulations maintain the higher rate of capitation in woodwork and cookery. It would economize time if the ordinary register sufficed for school classes in ambulance. Late in the year an attempt was made to establish technical classes in Blenheim, but the advance of summer and the attractions of the Marlborough Exhibition militated against success. This endeavour will be renewed in 1905. The Borough Council was approached re granting a site, but could not see its way to do so. It would greatly assist advancement in handwork-studies if the Department could arrange in the different education centres for periodical exhibitions of the work done in modelling, drawing, &c, at the higher schools of art in the colony. Singing was not taught in thirty-one schools. This proportion of the total number of schools is far too large, and should be much reduced during 1905. After the inspection visit, both singing and drill were taken up in a number of small schools, and the very fair beginning made is encouraging the teachers to continue their efforts. Needlework. —Much excellent needlework was produced in a number of the schools. The samples carried round from the best schools should cause improvement in those which showed inferior work. Drill. —There are thirteen of the smaller schools where physical training is neglected. It is desirable that there be none in this category during 1905. Military drill is taught in the larger schools, and opportunity was taken on inspection and examination visits to initiate the children of some of the others. A creditable display of physical exercises was made by several squads in the competitions held during Marlborough Exhibition week. According to the last report of the Officer Commanding the Cadets, Marlborough had four corps with a total of 201 of all ranks. A battalion has also been organized. The new regulations concerning recognition of " sections " may cause extension to take place. A difficulty prevented the concentration of cadets in an instruction-camp during the last school week, inasmuch as the officers are usually teachers and could not be spared from comparatively small schools without closing the schools altogether. In order, tone, and discipline few schools were lacking ; eighteen being accounted excellent, twentyone good, and only five unsatisfactory. Where tone was defective the want appeared due to lack of direction rather than to^intention. The New Syllabus.—lnform, teach to observe, elicit, experiment so as and mental faculty, follow the psychological growth of the child : these mark the main stages in educational theory, and the skilful teacher uses a combination of all. At one time it was thought that education consisted in a large accumulation of fact-knowledge, and in the youth of the sciences the educators naturally looked more to history and the humanities for their store of desirable facts. With the growth of inductive science a vast array of attractive facts was gathered in the fields of knowledge that deal more directly with nature than with the human mind. The educator accordingly began to divide his effort, aiming at teaching scientific as well as classic fact. As the sciences grew and ramified, the mass of material became so large that the facts culled from this region began to crush out those of the humanitarian order. At length they became so numerous that educators were brought face to face with the absolute absurdity of trying an inculcation of all the garnerings of the centuries. Collaterally with the growth of inductive science and as an offshoot from it had grown psychologic science or the inductive study of the growth and development of the human mind. It was thus discovered that the mind was not as the older educationists had thought, simply a receptacle for whatever might be thrown into it; nor as the later school—the school of Locke—taught, a purely plastic substance subject to external moulding but without initiative. The psychologists under the leadership of Kant discovered that the child was above all a centre of original action, and that the mind was capable of growth and development; and, further, that the child's development must proceed along the natural lines of growth. A close study of child-life was made in order to discover these natural lines. It was found that abstract reasoning was a late product, that the interesting was easily taught, that the child likes explanation, that he likes to do things, and, further, that there are as it were flood-times when certain classes of facts and phenomena are more interesting and their lessons assimilated more easily than at other times. These discoveries have reacted on educational method, making the approach to a subject consecutive, making books attractive with bold print and pictures, causing more stress to be laid on cause, effect, and purpose, introducing handwork to educate the senses and to afford scope for the child's desire to act and impress his individuality on the things about him, and it has also led in America and Germany to a concentric system of pouring all one's powers into special classes of work at what seems the right psychological time. Under the old syllabus the child might have been the receptacle of the older educationists, or the plastic material of Locke, but the new syllabus treats him from the point of view of the psychologist and tries not to cram him with facts, nor to mould him like the clay of the potter, but to elicit, to strengthen, and develop his faculties, whether of mind or body, as they arise in order of time, and to fit him to act and react on the world around him—to endow him with sufficient knowledge both' of fact and principle to enable him to energize to the fullest of his powers, and especially to tram turn to reason rightly when brought face to face with new classes of facts. This is the spirit of the new syllabus. It is no longer a controversy between instruction and education, it is a compound of Herbartian psychology and American utilitarianism. Its object is not to proceed from the easy to the