238 EDUCATION IN RURAL SCHOOLS. 



around them, and themselves to search for flowers, plants, insects, and other 

 objects, to illustrate the lessons which they have learnt with their teacher. 



" The Board consider it, moreover, highly desirable that the natural 

 activities of children should be turned to useful account — that their eyes, for 

 example, should be trained to recognise plants and insects that are useful or 

 injurious (as the case may be) to the agriculturist, that their hands should be 

 trained to some of the practical dexterities of rural life, and not merely to the 

 use of pen and pencil, and that they should be taught, when circumstances 

 permit, how to handle the simpler tools that ai^e used in the garden or on the 

 farm, before their school life is over. 



"The Board are of opinion that one valuable means of evoking interest 

 in country life is to select for the object lessons of the lower Standards 

 subjects that have a connection with the daily surroundings of the children, 

 and that these lessons should lay the foundation of a somewhat more compre- 

 hensive teaching of a similar kind in the upper Standards.'-' But these object 

 lessons must not be, as is too often the case, mere representations of descrip- 

 tions from text-books, nor a mechanical interchange of set questions and 

 answers between teacher and class. To be of any real use in stimulating the 

 intelligence, the object lessons should be the practising ground for observation 

 and inference, and they should be constantly illustrated by simple experiments 

 and practical work in which the children can take part, and which they can 

 repeat for themselves at home with their own hands. Specimens of such 

 Courses can be obtained on application to the Board of Education. These 

 may be varied indefinitely to suit the needs of particular districts. They are 

 meant to be typical and suggestive, and teachers, it is hoped, will frame others 

 at their discretion. Further, these lessons are enhanced in value if they are 

 connected with other subjects of study. The object lesson, for example, and 

 the drawing lesson, may often be associated together, and the children should 

 be taught to draw actual objects of graduated difficulty, and not merely to 

 work from copies. In this way they will gain a much more real knowledge of 

 common implements, fruits, leaves, and insects than if these had been merely 

 described by the teacher or read about in a lesson book. Composition 

 exercises may also be given — after the practical experiments and observations 

 have been made for the purpose of training the children to express m words 

 both what they have seen and the inferences which they draw from what they 

 have seen ; and the children should be frequently required and helped to 

 describe in their exercise books bights of familiar occurrence in the woods and 

 in the fields. Problems in arithmetic connected with rural life may also be 

 frequently set with advantage. 



"The Board of Education also attach considerable importance to work 

 being done by the elder scholars outside the school walls, whether such work 

 takes the form of elementary mensuration, of making sketch-plans of the 

 playground and the district surrounding the school, of drawing common 

 objects^ of paying visits of observation to woods, lanes, ponds, farms, and 

 other suitable places under the guidance of the teacher, or of the cultivation 

 of a school garden. 



"The teacher should, as occasion offers, take the children out of doors 

 for school walks at the various seasons of the year, and give simple lessons on 



2 The important points to be observed in all object teaching were set out in the Official 

 Circular (No. 369) issued on this subject on June 25th, 1895, copies of which may be obtained 

 from the Board of.Education. 



