PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 701 
thoughts determining the character of the teaching to be given in rural and 
urban schools for boys and girls. It was Herbart who insisted on the im- 
portance of creating a sort of centre around which school studies should be 
grouped with a view to giving unity and interest to the subjects of instruc- 
tion. I have elsewhere shown how a complete system of primary education 
may be evolved from the practical lessons to be learned in connection with 
outdoor pursuits, with workshop exercises and with the domestic arts, and how, 
by means of such lessons, the child’s interest may be excited and maintained in the 
ordinary subjects of school instruction, in English, arithmetic, elementary 
science, and drawing. In the proposals I am now advocating I am not suggesting 
any narrow or restricted curriculum. On the contrary, I believe that, by widening 
the child’s outlook, by closely associating school work with familiar objects, you 
will accelerate his mental development. and quicken his power of acquiring 
knowledge. I would strongly urge, however, that the child should receive less 
formal teaching, that opportunities for self-instruction, through outdoor pursuits, 
or manual exercises, or the free use of books, should be increased, so that as far as 
possible the teacher should keep in view the process by which in infancy and in 
early life the child’s intelligence is so rapidly and marvellously stimulated. 
Already we have discovered that our unscientific attitude towards primary 
education has caused us to overlook the essential difference between the require- 
ments of country and of town life, and the training proper to boys and girls, Our 
mechanical methods of instruction, as laid down in codes, make for uniformity 
rather than diversity, and we are only now endeavouring, by piecemeal changes, to 
bring our teaching somewhat more closely into relation with existing needs. But 
the inherent defect of our system is that we have started at the wrong end, and, 
instead of evolving our teaching from the things with which the child is already 
familiar, and in which he is likely to find his life’s work, we have taken him away 
from those surroundings and placed him in strange and artificial conditions, in 
which his education seems to have no necessary connection with the realities of 
life. 
The problem of primary education is to teach by practical methods the elements 
of letters and of science, the art of accurate expression, the ability to think and 
to control the will; and the ordinary school lessons should be such as lead to the 
clear apprehension of the processes that bring the child into intimate relation with 
the world in which he moves. During the last few years the importance of such 
teaching has dimly dawned upon our educational authorities, but, instead of being 
regarded as essential, it has been treated as a sort of evtra to be added to a literary 
curriculum, already overcrowded. What is known as manual training is to some 
extent encouraged in our schools, but it forms no part of the child’s continuous 
education. It is still hampered with conditions inconsistent with its proper place 
in the curriculum, and is uncoordinated with other subjects of instruction. 
Moreover no connecting link has yet been forged between the teaching of the 
Kindergarten and workshop practice in the school, We speak of lessons in 
manual training as something apart from the school instruction, as something 
outside the school course, on the teaching of which special grants are paid. 
Twenty or thirty years ago people used to talk about ‘teaching technical 
education,’ and from this unscientific way of treating the close connection that 
should exist between hand-work and brain-work our authorities have not yet freed 
themselves. 
It is true we have long since passed that stage when it was thought that the 
object of instruction in the use of tools was to make carpenters or joiners ; but, 
judging from a report recently issued by the Board of Education, it would seem 
that it is still thought that the object of cookery lessons to children of twelve to 
fourteen years of age is the training of professional cooks. Until the Board’s 
inspectors can be brought to realise that the aim and purpose of practical instruction 
in primary schools, whether in cookery or in other subjects, is to train the 
intelligence through familiar occupations, to show how scientific method may be 
usefully applied in ordinary pursuits, and how valuable manipulative skill may 
thus be incidentally acquired, it does not seem to me that they themselves have 
