E.—2.

to the dulness that clouded the reading-lesson when the aim was to make the children express the teacher's mind, not their own. It is surely a good thing that children should by effort find themselves. In respect of precision of enunciation and of purity of vowel-sounds, we are unable to report any improvement, and shall be until the art of reading is taught to those who are being trained for the profession, whether as pupil-teachers in the schools or as students in the training college. Spelling and writing call for little notice. The former is generally good, and often excellent, and teachers are realizing more and more that children should learn to use words before learning to spell them. Figures exeeptcd, writing is good in many schools, and would be better in all if teachers would take the trouble to make their pupils sit in right attitudes, and hold the pen in less fantastic ways. The penmanship <>f which commercial men complain is not. we think, the product of the primary school. It is not the hoy of thirteen or fourteen, it is the boy of fifteen or sixteen, who finds himself in the counting-house. For lapses that occur after thirteen or Fourteen our schools are not responsible. Of the teaching of arithmetic we have spoken elsewhere in this report, and need only add here that in many schools the pupils work too slowly, do not learn the tables thoroughly, make bad figures, and are not daily practised in " tots " from the beginning to the end of the year. Where the tables are well known, the figures well made, and the tots taken for five or ten minutes every day, the arithmetic is good. The mechanical work named above is of little educative value ; lint efficiency in it is essential to work that is of fine value as a training in logical thinking and expression. The fine results achieved by many teachers are proof enough that the two kinds of work can he well done if set about in the right way. It is with pleasure we report improvement in composition. The improvement is due partly to the large amount of spoken speech exacted from the children in connection with the new method of conducting the reading-lesson, partly to the introduction of additional reading-matter by the School Journal, which is read witli great interest by the children, and partly by increased attention to those departments of grammar without which rational study of form in composition is impracticable. The suggestions of the Department in respect of grammar have done much harm,end we are glad to find that teachers have at length come to realize that, though composition cannot lie taught through grammar, it call he taught only in a very Soppy and soppy way without grammar. It would be a distinct gain to the schools if all the pupils of Standard V and Standard VI had a text-book of grammar and composition from which to learn by their own effort what is right and why. and what is wrong and why, in written and spoken speech. ( burse A geography is generally well done by all the classes learning the subject. 'We wish we could express similar commendation of Course B. That the old lists of capes, bays, rivers, lakes, &c, should he committed to memory is. of course, out of the question at this time of day ; but it is surely reasonable to expect that no pupil should leave the upper classes of a school, as many now do, without power to read a map intelligently, and without having a fair knowledge of the important parts of the British Empire, of the main trade-routes of the world, and of the countries with which we compete in trade or have trade relations. Course B geography is specially weak in schools where a Geographical Reader is in use. The Reader usually contains too much detail to be an efficient instrument for the teaching of geography to children. The places mentioned in it are generally found by the pupils in their atlases, but little or no attempt is made by them to commit to memory the names and positions of even the most important. The drawing of maps containing a tithe of the names of places mentioned in the Reader and the committing to memory of the most important of them would, we feel sure, leave an impression of much greater value than that left by the reading of the text-book, while the effort to remember something of the geography-lesson would at any rate do more good than harm. The treatment of history is less satisfactory than that of any other subject of the school course. History is read in all the schools, and " explanation of and questions on the subject-matter form part of the lesson in connection with the Reader," as the regulations direct ; but beyond this little is done, •and most of the children are leaving school with only the vaguest notion of the important events in the life of the nation, and more than doubtful whether an important stage of its development was reached a thousand years ago or the year before last. They are absolutely devoid of the time-sense, and therefore without power to view events in right perspective. What is needed to form suitable soil for the growth of intelligent patriotism is the working-up of an outline of important events with their dates — a sort of skeleton to be clothed with living tissue by subsequent years of reading. In all the branches of handwork taken in the schools there is steady improvement. Cookery is much appreciated by the girls, woodwork by the boys, and gardening by both. In the last-named much very good work is done in the country schools. The gardens are useful and educative in four ways- —(1) they provide useful and pleasurable occupation ; (2) they provide material for nature-study ; (3) they induce in the children love of the beautiful in nature ; and (4) where comparative work is done, they teach something of the methods of science. We should like to see more made of the last of these. We are of opinion that more attention should be paid in the training college to agriculture and the foundation sciences of agriculture. The majority of the teachers leaving the college are at once put in charge of sole-teacher schools in the country, yet little is done in the college to make them familiar with methods of nature-study and the practical work of school gardening. The outside examination for the D and the C certificate is a bar to work that is of enormously greater value to the primary-school teacher than is much of that in which he has now to prepare himself for examination. To remove this bar was the aim of the proposals made to the Department by the Otago Education Board in 1904. The Board was, we believe, thanked for its proposals, and there the matter ended. We have, &c, P. GoYEft, I C. R. Richardson, t 0. R. Bossence, -IMF**". The Chairman, Education Board, Otago. ,1. R. Don, I

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