The Sun.
London, England, 1861-10-23 00:00:00

Kent and Co., Paternoster-row.

The Fourth Edition, Just Published, Bvo, in cloth, price ss.
by post free, 58.
QN TRUE and FALSE SPERMATORRWEA ;
with the View to the Correction of wide-spread Errors
in relation to the Treatment and Cure of Sufferers from De-
bility of the Generative system, or Sexual Ilypochrondriasis.
Translated from the German of Dr. PICKFORD.

" Dr. Pickford is known to English readers by his frequent
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scribed, and thus a safe guide is offered for the treatment of
the malady."—Medical Circular.

" We have dilated so long upon the contents of the preli-
minary chapter, that we have scarcely left ourselves space for
any notice of the subject specially treated of by Dr. Pickford ;
but the moderate price at which the 'brochure' is sold, places
it within the reach of every one interested in the matter."—
Dublin Medical Press.
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MI?. E. CHAD WICK ON THE EDUCI2I2ION
QUESIION.

A meeting of the Metropolitan Church School-
masters' Association was held yesterday evening,:at
the Whittington Club, under the presidency of Mr.
E. Chadwick. There was a numerous attendance
of the members of the association.

Mr. CHRISTIE, of Trinity School, Marylebone,
read a paper on the present position of elementary edu•
entinn. He vindicated the teachers against the stric-
tures of the Royal Commissioners on Education,
and severely condemned the provisions of the edu-
cational code recently promulgated. He denied
that the teachers were afraid of having their work
tested, maintained that the evidence on which their
failure had been assumed had been contradictory,
and argued that, if the revised code was put in force
the cause of education would greatly suffer.

The CHAIRMAN—The improvement of elementary
education, which is now under consideration as
being in issue, involves the future moral, social, and
economical condition of the population—not solely
of the general civic population, but the continuance
of large bodies of persons as habitual mendicants,
paupers, and delinquents. I might cite the evi-
dence collected by my lamented correspondent, the
late Rev. John Clay, the chaplain of the county
prison at Preston, to show that the fearful outbursts
of passion and brutality, which even military dis-
cipline does not repress in the adult stages, of which
Preston lately furnished one of those tragic examples
daily presented by the public papers, that these are no
longer chargeable to the deficiency of the educational
power of the trained school-teacher, but are depen-
dent on the maintenance and extension of that
power by an improved administration of educa-
tional funds ; and the responsibility for their con-
tinuance in the rising generation is now, or shortly
will be, at the door of the legislator. My own in-
vestigations showed that formerly, under malad-
ministration and under ill-conditioned teachers,
orphan and destitute children added largely to the
population of the prisons, but now that an improved
elementary education, under trained teachers, tends
most effectually to depopulate those places. Under
bad primary teaching the moral. failures were
as high as 60 per cent. Now under good
teachers and improved conditions, I must say of
bodily with mental training, the failures I have
proved are reduced, and are generally reducible, to
within 2 per cent. I have only time to advert to
some current fallacies, as they appear to me, which
jeopardise this promise of improvement, by tending
to lower the position and competency of the school-
master, and thence the moral influence to be
brought to bear upon children. One of the notions
propagated is that the tendency of improved pupil
teaching;and training is to put the school teacher
above his position, and that if the topics of ele-
mentary instruction be confined to reading, writing,
arithmetic, as commonly taught, the teacher's know-
ledge and attainments may be restricted to the old
primers, and that for mental instruction, which is
alone contemplated, a lower degree of skill and a
gradation of service will be needed. The expres-
sion is, " That the managers will have the advan-
tageoess
utfo lowerstudied
dceiuedrd o
wnqt
ihut
eha
morelitsfihucebra
jete
eaivcos
tne
od
ne:
nafabc eel
of obtaining when it may be wished a teacher
d
eemtrnhesetf.a,o,erriceTe
hicetotd
smutehcaawaytt
education
have
ete ttomehr
portion as we restrict the topics, as I apprehend
must be done with lower-class education, to meet
, the imperative demands for domestic and industrial

-
service, and with other classes to meet the demands

for physical training to ward of physlcallnjury, as
alsotherequirementshe a
of psychology to meet
and adjust mount of teaching to the
t
capacity of attention or the receiving power
at in proportion • as you
reduce differentducethequ ages,
yesOf elementary instruction, you
must, if you do your duty, carefully improve the
quality of every portion of that instruction. If it
be narrowed, it must be deepened for permanent and
salutary impression. You must evoke the perceptive
and the reasoning faculties if you would control
brute ignorance and blind passions. Let any one
who has the notion that reading may be taught
passably well by almost anybody hear reading les-
sons given by a trained teacher in improved methods,
and hear children exercised in parsing, in distill-
gnd uishing subject and predicate, that is to say in
logic, and he will form a better notion of the skill
which is required to teach reading, and of the new
mental exercise given in teaching, agnaduthetamkazby
ap-
I predate the position 45 not extrua

Dr. Simon Laurie, the secretary of the committee
of Church schools in Scotland, who declares that
" through no one subject can so much mental disci-
pline—using this expression in a.large sense—be
conveyed as through reading." Meal ling, of course,
by well-trained teachers, “We do• not hesitate to
say that no child can bo tatiklat to :mad accurately
intelligently, and expressively with atilt acquiring in
the course of that training an amount of mental cul-
tivation which exceeds in importarsce the cultivas
tion from all other subjects grated.' Let an inquir-
ing person also see the imprOved to aching of arith-
metic, which has been termed, foo m its mental
exercise, the geometry of the poor. Let him read
the instructions to teachers framed„ after years of
trial and study, by the late Mr. Horace Giant, for
teaching the elements of aripimetic to infants, and
the conception of the candid inquirer may be ele-
vated to this, whether for the most improved teach-
ing it were not desirable, if practicable, to have
special inspectors and separate masters for each
branch as for specialities. The general result of such
an examination will be that not low, or lower, but
positively higher qualifications and service are needed
for the lowest classes receiving elementary instruc-
tion, and most of all for those important schools, the
infant schools, for which good teachilrs are extreme-
ly rare. Indeed it is the practice in the best train-
ing colleges, as I am informed, to direct the labours
of the best pupil-teachers as to the lowest classes in
the school, The current fallacy receives support
from the fact, as it is reported to be, and is likely
to be, that the best teaching is not always by the
highest certificated masters, of which I myself have
seen examples. But this is due, according to my
information, to misplaced payments for results, the
highest certificates and emoluments have been given
originally (though less so at present and by amended
regulations) for learning, for acquirements, instead
of on evidence of results achieved by the exercise of
a widely
rar e different and :one which is really
morea nd power,
valuable—namely,
the power of im-
parting knowledge, and that to children. Vastly
learned men are often most deficient in this power,
which requires a knowledge of the minds of chil-
dren, and a sympathy with them to lead them will-
ingly and pleasantly and profitably. I now beg
leave to advert to the presumed state of official in-
formation on which the minutes bearing upon the
elementary education has been framed. In a paper
which I could only submit as a letter to Mr. Senior,
one of the commissioners, towards the close of the
labours of the education commission, I felt it a duty
to represent and offer proof that the office of the
Committee of Privy Council on Education, from
being conducted on an erroneous administrative
principle, was itself, and must be, dangerously ill-
informed as to its own subject-matter of duty. I
know what it is to be in a central position, where
you are subject to snowstorms of papers of a sort
which do not enlighten, but which if you do not
take great care blind you. From my own expe-
rience I know that this must be the position of an
office having a direct correspondence from at least
7,000 such places, and such persons unskilled in
official business as the common school managers. I
appeal to the professional knowledge of the meeting,
whether the revised code for the regulation of na-
tional elementary education will not have afforded
a complete subsequent verification of my position
as to the want of proper knowledge for framing it,
to every school teacher throughout the country.
To take one example, that of the provision for
the classification of children according to ages.
If the codifier had ever been into national
schools he would often have seen large, lumping
lads towering amidst classes of little boys, lads of
twelve with little fellows of seven. If he were asked
why this was he might be told that this was to the
schoolmaster a disagreeable necessity ; that the little
ones were drafts from the infant school, that the large
one had never been in a school before, and that to
place him with boys of his own age, though in some
respects convenient, would be a waste of time, and
confusion to him and annoyance to the class. Take
another example—the measure of payments for re-
sults. lam myself a promoter of the principle of
payment for results, and being so I am annoyed at
the damage it will probably receive from its misap-
plication by the code. I proposed it as a payment,
not in substitution, still less in reduction, but in aug-
mentation of existing low salaries, to be applied
under conditions of equality, and freed from all
shackles of condition and restraint, such shackles as
the revised code imposes as to times and ages. In
illustration of the violent inequality of conditions
which the code imposes I may mention that I have
shown that a trained teacher on a larger scale in a
populous town school, with a subdivision of educa-
tional labour, will get boys through the three It's,
as they are called, and obtain results well in three
' years from the time of leaving an infant school, or
by the tenth year. Whilst the same teacher placed
in a small country school, though with a pupil-
teacher, and the same proportion of teaching power,
will not, as shown by the evidence of Mr. Allen, the
. teacher of the school under Earl Russell's auspices
at Petersham, and by Mr. T. Crampton, at Brent-
; ford, be able to get children, even imperfectly, in

less than six years, or by the 13th year of age. But
large proportions of parents will have children out
of school, or in some sort of productive service, be
tween their 10th and 11th year, that is to say, by
the time they are half taught those primary ele-
ments which the teacher is only to be paid for teach-
ing completely. Further, the teacher in the small
school will often have more labour in teaching a
class of 10 than a teacher in a large town school,
with large and good classes, will have in teach-
ing a class of 50; yet, according to the mode of
paying for results by the Privy Council, the man
who has really had the harder sacrifice will
receive only one-fifth the rate of remuneration
given to the other teacher for serious work. A fair
equality of conditions requisite for the efficient ap-
plication of the principle is only to be obtained by
administrative combinations of which the framers
of the code cannot have any conception. Allow
me to present another example of the state of the
officicial information which directs the application
of the funds for the promotion of national educa-
tion. About the time when, with Lord Elcho, we
directed public attention to the expediency of the
introduction of military drill into schools, Mr. Wil-
liam Ewart took upon himself to ask, in Parlia-
ment, the Secretary of the Education Committee of
Privy Council whether it could not take some steps
for the introduction of the drill into the national
schools; whereupon Mr. Lowe, as reported in the
Times, answered curtly, that the business of the
department was to. educate. How smart ! yet in
the opinion, I may now say, of the medical profes-
sion, who are aware of the extensive' disease to be
eradicated by physical training, how deplorably
superficial the answer ! As cif teaching, not by word
alone, but by outward and visible acts and deeds—
so teaching all that is termed discipline—prompt
obedience to command, patience, self-restraint,
order—could, according to the conception of the
changing political party chief, form no part of the
elementary system of national education. As if
giving by physical training aptitudes to physical
labour had no moral effects. As if conditions of
physical inaptitude to labour were not with some
classes equivalent to trained aptitudes tc idleness
and vice. As if the drill were not a potent means
to book instruction in large schools, by giving
order and promptitude to class movements,
and saving time and freshening up the
scholars. The like answer was given at the office
to an application for a sanction to the payment
for the service of a drill-sergeant at a large school,
as if it were a thing unknown, unprecedented, un-
warrantable. At that very time I was inspecting
the services of drill sergeants and mates, who were
appointed under the authority of the Privy Council,
who were paid from thence, who
evidence of certificated teachers, andwe otrehe
a Privy Council inspector; and I was taking the
rs,inspected
o n theby
experience for years of the admirable working of

the system, of which the changing party chief and
the heads of that same office evidently knew abso-
lutely nothing themselves, and could not have con-
sulted those who are in such an office, if well con-
ducted, its responsible eyes and ears—namely, the
inspectors. To give another instance. You may see
that Nr. Lingen, in his evidence to the commis-
sioners, conveys the impression that the experience
of the department was unfavourable to the forma-.
tion of district school unions or the combination of
local educational means ; that there was no instance
of anything being done that favoured the view of
the practicability of such combinations. Now I
would direct your attention to the evidence I col-
lected, for example,of the Faversham School Union,
which is under the Privy Council inspection, and
with others to which my attention was directed by
Privy Council inspectors. The information I col-
lected upon that topic—and I might have collected
much more of the like character—displayed the action
of new elementary principles, which ought to be
known within the office as being under its supervision,
and which such judges in educational matters as my
Lord Brougham and Mr. John Stuart Mill have de-
clared to be complete and sufficient in itself, and
such as should be made generally known for the
guidance of legislation. I have no doubt that the gen-
tlemen to whom I advert have acted on their sincere
conviction, according to the limits of their informa-
tion ; but I repeat here what I have felt it a duty
to represent elsewhere, that entirely new adminis-
trative arrangements must be made to ensure better
information, and responsible consultation of it, be-
fore the elementary eduCation of the country can
make the extension and advance which is required
to be made for the welfare of the population. I
believe it will be found on inquiry that the order
was issued without any consultation whatever with
the inspectors as a body. I think it deeply to be
regretted that powers which it was so important to
have augmented and strengthened for the public
service in the promotion' of education should have
been discredited, as they undoubtedly have been,
and good principles damaged, by the mode in which
the new code has been framed and issued.
Mr. Easton, Mr. Langton, and others afterwards
addressed the meeting, and condemned the revised
code.

Mr. PHILLIPS, in moving a vote of thanks to Mr.
Christie, said the system of classifying the pupils
according to age was ridiculous. As well might it
be concluded that every man who was 75 years of
age was a Lcrd Palmerston. (Laughter.)
The motion was carried, and after a similar tri-
bute had been paid to the chairman, the meeting
broke up.