The Training of Teachers and Other Educational Papers

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: as it required (send here again I use the word advisedly) teachers to begin to teach writing and arithmetic on the same day on which they began to teach reading, and also to pay more attention to mere mechanical facility in the use of the mere instruments of education. These were the primary objects of the Revised Code; so far, it was educationally sound, and so far it will be, I trust, a permanent institution. The Privy Council took aim at certain evils, and they hit their mark. But, unfortunately, while curing a particular disease, they set up an unhealthy action in the body scholastic as a whole. The country was resolved to get a substantial commodity in return for its outlay. With this view it concentrated its attention on things which had an admitted value and the aspect of substantiality, and ignored all others. For how could a Code weigh or measure intellectual, moral, or aesthetic results! Here was a difficulty at the threshold. These evidently were regarded as visionary things. If entertained at all, they were entertained with that supercilious contempt of true education, characteristic of minds which find in Marathon and Thermopylae the insignificant records of mere tribal contests. The Department accordingly made grants in aid turn on attendance at school and on individual passes in reading, writing, and ciphering?all measurable quantities. Given an arithmetical unit of measure for school work and assign to it the value of a coin of the realm, and you Lord Sherbrooke's address to the Institute of Engineers. could express the working result of each school by so many figures. The annual Report of the Department might have consisted of a big number, and nothing more. Any gentleman could have carried it home from the House on his thumb-nails?expenditure on...