508 REPORTS ON THE STATE OF SCIENCE. 



are scrupulously clean, may best be illustrated by the simplest chemical 

 manipulation, and the school should be furnished with a room — not neces- 

 sarily a laboratory in the sense in which that term is generally em- 

 ployed — in which easy experiments may be performed by the children 

 themselves. As lessons in cooking cannot be given usefully until the 

 child has acquired some manipulative skill, and has reached the higher 

 standards, it is better that the course of experimental science should 

 precede the practical teaching of that subject. It is a matter for con- 

 sideration whether the science lessons should be combined with the 

 teaching of cooking, illustrating as they arise some of its underlying 

 principles, or whether they should run parallel with the instruction or 

 should precede the practical teaching of the subject. Something may be 

 said for each of these plans, but the balance of advantage is in favour of 

 the last, attention being directed to the results of the scientific experi- 

 ments with which the child would be previously familiar in explanation 

 of cooking processes. 



' The selection of subjects for the science lessons and the arrangement 

 of experiments to be performed by the children themselves demand 

 much thought on the part of the teacher, and should not be undertaken 

 without careful preparation. They should be such as would find full 

 illustration in the practical teaching, not only of cooking, but of house- 

 wifery and general hygiene.' 



There can be little doubt that at present boys exhibit more initiative 

 than girls in the general work of the standards ; girls appear to be more 

 prone to work by rule of thumb. Without attempting to discuss the 

 reasons for this characteristic, the fact remains that domestic duties call 

 for more initiative, more executive ability, more power of organisation, 

 and more common-sense, than do the ordinary vocations that boys follow 

 on leaving school. The woman in the home is continually confronted Avith 

 new problems the solution of which demands trained intelligence and 

 a habit of thought. A training in the methods of experimental inquiry 

 would appear to be the most direct means of creating the thinking 

 habit, and if the subject-matter of inquiry chiefly relate to the phe- 

 nomena and materials of home life such teaching should do much to 

 render more rational the management of the home. Experiments made 

 during the past three years in two large schools in Dublin and Belfast, 

 in each of which five hundred boys and girls have been taught by the same 

 instructor, tend to show no material difference between boys and girls 

 in reasoning or manipulative ability after the first arithmetical diflSculcies 

 have been overcome ; we believe that the reforms in the teaching of 

 arithmetic suggested in our last Report, accompanied by accurate experi- 

 menting, would do much to abolish the love of rules and recipes so often 

 noticed in the higher classes of girls' schools. There is little reason to 

 advocate different courses of instruction for boys' and girls' schools ; the 

 explanation of the common phenomena of daily life are of equal importance 

 to both, although it may be advisable to consider popular prejudice 

 and make the boys' programme look a little less domestic than that of 

 the girls. 



The character of the instruction in both boys' and girls' schools 

 requires to be far less academic than heretofore ; there must be more 

 deliberate purpose of training to think and reason in terms of everyday 

 life. A lesson without some application to common experience should, in 

 the primary school, be regarded with suspicion. 



