EDUCATION OF THE PEOPLE. 271 



to the work in good model-schools under competent superintendents.* 

 But learned masters, men of a station of life far above that of the scho- 

 lars, are not required, nay, owing to the temptations which such persons 

 have to shoot over the pupils heads, ought to be studiously avoided. t 

 A plain and useful education and a good store of common sense are 

 the points to be desired : training and practice will do the rest. Do 

 objectors say that more is proposed than can be attained in the short 

 time that parents allow for their children's schooling, and that by at- 

 tempting too much the risk is incurred of teaching nothing thoroughly ? 

 Our own great maxim is learn a lit* fa thoroughly : and it is not un- 

 reasonable to suppose that four years that is the interval between 

 seven and eleven (the average time of leaving the day-school) are 

 fully sufficient to make the pupil respectably conversant with the lead- 

 ing facts of geography and English history, and to teach them the ele- 

 ments of arithmetic, say the four rules, with their application to money 

 and the weights and measures. The statement here made of what not 

 only can be, but has been, realized on a large scale, will, we are sure, 

 be confirmed by the testimony of intelligent teachers and inspectors of 

 the British schools, and of those formed on the model of the Edinburgh 

 sessional school. Perhaps the greatest obstacle to the adoption of 



* On the subject of the training of masters, Dr. Bryce observes : " I consider;the educa- 

 tion of the masters to be more important than all other elements, on a system of public 

 education, put together." He conceives it to be as absurd to establish a school, with- 

 out taking care that the master be an intelligent man, who understands human nature, 

 and how to manage the human mind, as it would be to establish a dispensary, and fill 

 its shelves with a store of medicine, and then place it under the superintendence of 

 some weaver or cobbler, who had not been able to procure employment in his own 

 trade. He conceives that a teacher of a school for the poor requires less learning than 

 a teacher of a school for the rich ; but he requires more professional skill, because the 

 children of the upper classes, from the circumstances in which they are placed, have 

 greater facilities of acquiring intellectual improvement ; the teacher of the children of 

 the poor has to deal with minds which require more skill to bring out their faculties. 

 Dr. Bryce's Evidence before the. Commons' Select Committee. Dr. Bryce's Lec- 

 tures on Education, delivered in town a few weeks ago, were particularly worthy of 

 every teacher's diligent attention. Schoolmasters unfortunately are often too conceited 

 to listen to the instructions of one whom they would fain call a theorist. Dr. Bryce 

 is not a mere theorist. 



t Nothing requires more judgment and discretion than the apportionment of the 

 work, both as to kind and degree. Professor Pillans, in his " Principles of Elementary 

 Teaching," makes some very good observations on this subject : 



" It requires a considerable share of judgment and in this an otherwise accom- 

 plished teacher may be greatly deficient to resist the temptation there is to go beyond 

 what is fit for the present use of his pupils, a temptation likely to be the stronger 

 the more knowledge he himself possesses. And as his own familiarity with the subject 

 before him is on the one hand apt to mislead him into the abstruser parts of it, whither 

 the child cannot follow him, so on the other he is sometimes tempted to feed the 

 vanity of parents, by encouraging a display of attainments in their children which he 

 himself knows to be fallacious. To exemplify this in the instances of the tree and the 

 cart. A teacher would surely be showing more zeal than judgment, if, not satisfied 

 with those obvious characters which the youngest pupil can examine with his own 

 eyes and hands, he should waste his time in describing the process of smelting the iron 

 of which the wheel-ring is made, or even in explaining the reason why it is first heated 

 to redness, applied in that state to the wooden circle, and then suddenly cooled. Nor 

 should I think him better employed, if, instead of making a boy acquainted with the 

 parts of trees, their different species and appearances, and their uses in furniture and 

 machinery, he should descant on the process of fructification, or on the circulation of 

 the sap, and the vessels by which it is conducted.'* 



