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mixture of the oral and written elements; but in the senior classes the written exercises should largely predominate. These are the most difficult, but they will be found to be the most valuable, as they teach spelling, grammar, composition, &c., as well as the immediate subject to which they are supposed to relate.

Revision essential. When the exercises are written, they should be revised with great care and faithfulness. This is the chief difficulty when the classes are large, but without it the lessons become useless, if not injurious. The teacher should make time for doing it himself, or else delegate the duty to such of his scholars or monitors as he can thoroughly depend upon.

Method of. The following plan of examination is stated by Mr. Morrell to be amongst the most effectual devised. It is practised by the teacher who describes it for him. The teacher says,

'I have one hundred and twenty slates of home tasks brought at once. After play-time each boy takes his slate from its nail, and stands to a line round the room. On one side are those who know how to do long division, that is, the reduction and proportion classes; these I call examiners. On the other side are all the others, who will generally require their sums to be examined, and many of them set. I then walk along the line and hear every copy read; then the examiners sit on four or five forms, and the others take their slates to them to be examined; if the work be wrong, the examiner hears the boy do it till it is right; but if found correct, he signs his name and sends the owner with it to me. The examiners also bring their own slates to me at the same time. I seat myself conveniently to receive the slates, inspect them, and mark the date in a fractional form on every book or slate, as far as the boy has done. If I have any suspicion of the examiner, I hand the slate to a pupil-teacher to check any error. Generally I find nearly all this can be done in twenty or twenty-five minutes.' The practice of bringing the exercise worked out on slates may be objectionable, from the awkwardness and inconvenience of bringing slates backwards and forwards from home to school; but the principle of correction here resorted to—that of appointing deputy examiners-may be carried out advantageously in almost any school. But teachers ought to remember, that the less they depute their own work to others, the better it will be done. Properly prepared note-books ought always to be used instead of

slates.

Oral lessons. I have noticed two very serious and very general faults in hearing these. (1) The tasks are merely repeated, or said, as it is called, to the master; and (2) they are heard individually, and not, as they ought to be, in classes.

1. Rote answering. The mere repetition of the words of any

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lesson is no proof that the child understands it. If he say it well, it is certainly a test of his diligence and earnestness when at home, and is so far satisfactory; but the master who limits his attention to this test is discharging his duty very badly, and indeed is doing no more than any boy might do for another, as not the smallest professional skill is requisite.

When the 'tasks' are so taught, very few children have proper ideas of what is contained in the text-books, but especially of the definitions, in which, however, a clear and full comprehension of their meaning is so absolutely necessary. In granımar, for instance, when pupils are questioned as to the meanings of the terms generally made use of, they utterly fail. In geography, the things defined are so seldom explained that their knowledge in this most interesting subject is mere word knowledge, and the map is so seldom consulted during the repetition, that the exercise becomes a mere test of memory, that child passing the examination most creditably who remembers most. And so on with the other subjects. Lessons thus taught are worthless in an educational point of view, and he who knows how very valuable such lessons could be made, must look, as I do, with deep regret upon the unintellectual form which they are allowed to assume.

2. Individual teaching, To hear the tasks individually is a most serious fault, inasmuch as, from the loss of time which it necessarily involves, the master is obliged to omit some of the most important parts of his duty, and to discharge the rest without intelligence, and without that patient thoughtfulness which is necessary to success. Such a practice is moreover subversive of all order and all system.

Evils of.

About half an hour daily is the period generally set apart for Home Lessons,' and this, in a properly conducted school, is amply sufficient; but by the individual system of hearing them, it would occupy at least ten times as long. Let us take, for instance, the moderate calculation that there will be, on an average, the following children in each class:

10 in the highest,

10 in the next,

12 in the next,

and that each child will be prepared with tasks in two separate subjects; and this is a very low estimate indeed. There will, therefore, be, according to this system, sixty-four distinct tasks to be gone through, which, at five minutes for each, will give fire hours and twenty minutes, a time that could not possibly be so devoted.

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Suppose that these are heard in the half-hour, as they profess to be; then we have the startling fact, that each task could not occupy more than half a minute! Now, what task could be even repeated in that time? I am aware that many teachers, who have half an hour marked on their time tables for this duty, occupy very frequently an hour and upwards, in order to get through the business tolerably; but this is merely committing a violation of rules in neglecting the written record of the school, and does not much improve the value of the tasks themselves. Can anything, therefore, be plainer than that either the individual system must be abandoned, or the lessons must remain, as they now are, a mere mockery of teaching?

Irregular attendance not a good excuse for individual teaching. The excuse, so frequently offered by teachers, that 'they are driven into this course by the irregularity of the children's attendance,' is not valid. In the first case, nothing should drive them to do what is a mere waste of time, useless to the children, and destructive of order; and, secondly, they should not act unjustly, and all who practise this system must clearly do so; for it compels them to punish the most deserving, in order to let offenders escape lightly. That this is so, will be easily perceived from the following calculation. Suppose that the lesson extends to half an hour, and that all the children (say fifteen) are learning the same part; it is clear that each child will receive the full benefit of the thirty minutes, on the principle of collective teaching, so well understood at the present time. But suppose that one of these attended well, and that the remaining fourteen attended so irregularly that in the end they came all to have different places; the consequence would be, that each child would then receive but two minutes, instead of thirty; and that he who attended well, and who, on that account, deserved encouragement and reward, would be actually punished by the loss of twenty-eight minutes' instruction, and this simply because of the irregularity of those with whom it was his misfortune to be associated. And yet this is the result of that system which permits every child to take up the place in his book at which he left off when last in attendance, no matter how far his class-fellows may have gone on. It punishes the just for the unjust.

Loss brought on each child by himself. It is no reason to urge that to skip through the book is a disadvantage; for if there is any serious loss, it is brought on those who suffer it by themselves. They, and they only, are to blame, and upon them only should the disadvantage rest. I am aware that most children, on their return after a lengthened absence, insist upon being heard what has been taught to their previous class-fellows; but to any

such child the teacher should always be prepared to say, ‘I should be glad to teach you these lessons, and would have done so had you come, but now I cannot possibly teach them to you alone without depriving others of my time, to which they are equally entitled with yourself. You lose certainly for the present, but you have none but yourself to blame. Be therefore more diligent at home to remedy the disadvantage caused by your absence. The evil was brought about by yourself, but the cure is in your own hands.' He can also explain generally to the children that this system causes loss of time to all-that if each had his own way all would lose the twenty-eight minutes out of the half-hour, and that, therefore, they ought to consider how much more profitable it would be to receive the lesson lasting for thirty minutes instead of for two, even when joined with the disadvantage of occasionally passing over some pages when unavoidably absent,

'Skipping' is not so serious an evil as it is thought. This skipping of pages, however, is not so serious an evil as many suppose. It is too frequently taken for granted that the text-booksthe grammar, geography, 'Spelling Book Superseded,' &c.—are so progressively compiled, that one lesson is absolutely and essentially necessary for the proper comprehension of the next. This is by no means the case; each column of the spelling-book is independent of the one before or after; and although in the grammar and geography there is not so great a want of connection, there is yet sufficient to make it quite possible for any child to understand one part without having read what went immediately before. In the description of any continent, for instance, we have the countries and their chief towns, the bays and gulfs, the islands, the mountains, the rivers, &c. grouped separately. A child may not have learned the 'bays and gulfs,' for instance; but he may, nevertheless, be quite capable of getting off any of the others, and, therefore, of joining the class with perfect advantage to himself.

Changing the system when once established. Many teachers, to whom I have thus explained the defects of the individual system, have not given it up. They say it is impossible; but although, in their cases, from its being so long, and therefore so firmly, established, giving it up may be a matter of extreme difficulty, and requiring great tact and firmness, yet it is by no means impossible. I have seen the whole system completely changed without a murmur from either the children or the parents, on the appointment of a new teacher; and besides, it is utterly and entirely discontinued in all good schools, of which, I am happy to say, the number is by no means so small that I cannot quote meffectively as examples to others.

Some teachers deceive themselves into the belief that they

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have given up the individual system of teaching these lessons when they call up all the classes at one time, and thus imagine that their instruction is, as a consequence, collective; one teacher, in particular, who stated to me that he had only one class of home lessons, had in reality a dozen. His method of proceeding was somewhat thus: He called up the three highest reading classes of his school, and formed them into one class, by making them stand together, with toes to the draft circle. He then took the first boy's book, and heard him his spelling; then the next boy's, and heard him; or, if two or three happened to be in the same part of the book, he gave a question to each of them consecutively. But this, as I showed him—without, however, convincing him— was nothing but the individual system, with the shadow of a modification introduced occasionally-a class not being a mere assemblage of children round a line, but an assemblage of children receiving a common instruction upon the same lesson.

Hints to assist teachers in changing. To assist teachers who are endeavouring to get rid of the individual system, I may suggest the propriety of having at least three different sections for home lessons arranged on the basis of the ordinary classification of the school, but slightly different from it. Suppose the classes for ordinary purposes were a, b, c, d, e-a being the highest; they might be divided, for the purpose of home lessons, into three, by putting part of b with a, and the remaining part of it with c, and joining d and e together, for it will always be found that some in any intermediate class will be fitted to go with the next above, while the rest will scarcely be much in advance of those below. Now, if a boy in class a is absent for several days, it may so happen that, when he returns, those in class b will be about the place at which he was when he left. He can therefore fall in with them for some time, until, by a little more diligence and extra work at home, he qualifies himself for his former position.

Lessons defined for a week in advance. Again, in each class there should be a black-board or tablet suspended, upon which would be written the lessons for a week in advance, and of which each child should be required to take a copy on Friday evening, or Saturday. This would enable all absentees to prepare the proper lesson, if absent any time in the week. This arrangement could be carried out very simply, and is valuable in many ways besides the one just given.

Preparation of lessons in school. With regard to the preparation of these lessons in school, instead of out of school, it is scarcely necessary to say more than that such a course would entirely defeat every good end they were intended to produce.