854 REPORT—1904. 
ing accommodation will thus be at once doubled. In the training of secondary 
teachers now made necessary by the registration conditions the great difficulty 
is to get any teachers to train. The superior attractions of the Civil Service, the 
professions and business, practically leave no first-class men for schoolmastering. 
ft is not easy to add another costly year to the costly training which already 
attracts so few. All training must be in connection with some university centre, 
and a great future is to be anticipated for the Cambridge Training School, where 
secondary and primary teachers are taught together. Experience shows the 
difficulty of a practising-ground for the secondary teachers, for classes in primary 
schools are often entirely unlike those in secondary. 
The Rev. J. F. Tristram said that he protested against the light-hearted 
suggestions made concerning the training of secondary teachers. ‘Those who 
thought that it would be wise to send into our secondary schools men and 
women who had had no special preparation for their duties, ‘and see how their 
new ideas would work, and those who believed it unwise to differentiate the 
training of elementary and secondary teachers, but to ‘see what sort of teachers 
they would turn out to be’ after a generalised course of training, were not good 
guides at the present crisis. They forgot the facts. Teaching was becoming 
more and more a highly specialised craft, demanding peculiar gifts and a 
laborious apprenticeship, and the difference between the subject-matter of the 
education of those attending primary and higher schools surely required a 
different training. This divergence was not likely to diminish, but to increase. 
As for the expedients for attracting children of a lower social class into the ranks 
of secondary teaching, to remedy the great and increasing demand for recruits, 
he had the gravest doubts of its success and of its influence upon our public 
schools, and demanded that the ordinary commercial law of supply and demand 
should be applied to the profession, saying that the attractions of other careers 
than teaching would always take away the most promising young people until 
the remuneration offered by this profession should be raised and the conditions 
of tenure should be rendered more reasonable. This surely was the way to 
attract better and more recruits, and until the supply were increased in this 
honest and natural way the talk about methods of training was idle, because 
there would be no candidates for the teaching profession to be trained. 
Dr. Mangold said that in Germany elementary and secondary teachers were 
trained separately and differently. Financial difficulties would diminish if the 
training of secondary teachers was entrusted to prominent masters as an additional 
work, and paid accordingly. The most important thing was practical training. 
Pupil-teachers ought to see the imparting of knowledge by excellent masters. 
2. The Research Method applied to Experimental Teaching. 
Ly Professor H. E. Armstrone, LL.D., #.RS. 
Dr. Armstrong insisted at the outset that no other method was possible; that 
merely to follow directions, as is done in so much of our laboratory work, is not 
experimenting in any sense of the term. The practical verification by students 
of statements brought under their notice often affords valuable discipline in mani- 
pulation, and it may bring facts home and fix them in the memory in a way not 
otherwise possible ; but such teaching does not serve to develop in any proper way 
logical habits of thought and alertness of mind, nor does it serve to cultivate the 
spirit of inquiry. 
Rightly viewed, an experiment has three stages: (1) the stage of conception; 
(2) that of performance ; (3) that of utilisation. Of these the second is relatively 
very easy ; but it is the mere mechanical bridge between the first and third, and 
yet, as arule, it all but monopolises the attention of the student. It is essential 
that in every experiment there should be some clearly defined purpose or motive 
in view, some definite problem to be solved; that some question should be asked 
from the outset for which an answer can be sought. Then must come the question 
whether any clue can be found and worked upon. The best way of making the 
