3

E.—6

So far as the training of secondary-school teachers is concerned matters remain very much as before. In three of the training-college centres students who desire to specialize in secondary-school work are given the opportunity of entering any of the local secondary or technical high schools ; they spend periods of from three to five weeks at a time in observing the work of expert teachers and in practising under skilled Heads of Departments. The system is undoubtedly imperfect, but the students are grateful for the opportunities provided, and for the help and guidance accorded to them by Principals and Heads of Departments. In Auckland the facilities described above are available at the technical school and the Kowhai Junior High School only. It is pleasing to note that more and more of our young teachers have availed themselves of the benefit of a training-college course. So far as the men are concerned, the proportion of trained teachers has for some years risen steadily, but during this last year a really notable record has been established, in that 97 per cent, of the male entrants into the ranks of the secondary-school teachers had passed through a training college. Of the forty-one women entrants thirty had either attended a trainingcollege or had obtained practice as home-science student-teachers, and six others had had previous teaching experience. It should scarcely be necessary to draw attention to these figures, but popular beliefs die hard, and the statement is still idly repeated in some quarters that the great majority of secondary-school teachers are quite untrained. Within the past two years a notable expansion of the system of Heads of Departments has taken place, and more and more Principals are availing themselves of the assistance of the abler senior members of their staffs and delegating to them some measure of responsibility for the maintenance of a high standard in the teaching of their particular subjects. In the large city schools in Wellington and in the South the Heads have been particularly helpful in superintending the practice of the students in training. The number of Heads that may be appointed is prescribed by regulations, and varies from one in schools with a minimum roll of 300 to three in schools with 600 pupils or more ; in general, also, it is required that there should be at least three junior teachers in the subject for which the Head is responsible. In 1929 the regulations permitted the appointment of forty-six Heads of Departments in all, but only thirty-five were actually employed ; of the eleven vacancies eight were in girls' and two in mixed schools. Turning to the standard of the work being accomplished in the secondary schools, and to the methods employed in attaining that standard, it may be stated that the year has been one of steady application and reasonable progress ; no startlingly new method of attack or presentation has been applied in the teaching of any subject, and, on the whole, the tendency has been to realize that, after all, some of the older methods had in them many elements that made for soundness and thoroughness. Unfortunately, they were often of such a nature as to fail to retain, or even to arouse, the pupil's interest, and by their very thoroughness they sometimes succeeded in creating an actual distaste for the subject studied. It was only natural that following the lead and guidance of expert and earnest educationists we should adopt brighter and less rigid methods, and seek to give the pupil greater scope to develop his own aptitudes in his own way. There is a growing conviction among many teachers, however, that as applied to some subjects the new methods have gone a little too far in their laudable desire to escape from formalism, and that, as a consequence, our school-children have not the sound knowledge of certain fundamental processes that their predecessors of ten to twenty years ago possessed. In English the teaching of literature continues to develop satisfactorily, and in most schools the library is becoming more and more a centre of general interest. The practice of setting aside definite periods in the library for silent reading is also steadily growing. On the other hand, there has been a distinct lapse in the standard reached in formal work, with the inevitable result that the teaching both of English composition a.nd of foreign languages has been seriously affected. While it is admitted that some of the fault lies with the secondary school, it is also true that many new entrants, in some cases the great majority, come up insufficiently prepared in formal work. The primary-school syllabus, although purposely stated in fairly general terms, is for the most part adequate, so that the main responsibility lies with the individual school or teacher. A more general insistence upon definite and accurate grammatical knowledge would be of distinct benefit to the pupil in his secondary course. It is a little disconcerting, too, to realize that, in spite of the increasing amount of time devoted in recent years to the reading and appreciation of literature, both in primary and in secondary classes, there has been no apparent commensurate development of the pupils' power of expression as judged by their composition work, and that so far as the more mechanical points of composition are concerned —spelling, punctuation, sentence-structure, &c. —the work of many of our first-year pupils is pitifully weak. There is no gainsaying the fact that the standard of spelling among entrants to secondary schools has deteriorated considerably during the past ten years or so. Whether this deterioration has resulted from the adoption of new methods of teaching the subject in the primary schools, I am not in a position to state, but it is to be hoped that a remedy may soon be found for the present state of affairs. As far as the teaching of foreign languages is concerned there is little fresh comment to make. Latin continues to be taken by only a comparatively small proportion of pupils (a little over 38 per cent.). In some ways this preference for Latin over French is to be regretted. In the early stages there should be little difference in attraction between the two, especially nowadays, when interesting text-books in Latin are available. In ease of pronunciation Latin undoubtedly has the advantage. For pupils who are destined to proceed only a short way in a foreign language, an elementary knowledge of Latin is possibly more useful than a little French, since even a small vocabulary will provide the key to many groups of derived English words. For those, however, who contemplate proceeding to more advanced studies the choice is not so obvious, as a mastery of Latin is admittedly more difficult of attainment and probably offers fewer practical advantages than does the ability to read and appreciate current French literature.