114 Timehri. 
tion, scampishness (“tickling the *vance,” etc.), unreliability, and studied 
villamy, were daily becoming more rife among the rising generations fresh fron: 
the elementary schools. 
Just here it is fair to add that the teachers had been seriously handicapped 
in matters of discipline by the Children’s Protection Society, which did much 
mischief in the wholesale prosecution of parents and teaches for punishing 
yvung scoundrels whom its officers did not know, and on whose upbringing 
they expended no proper care as an alternative to corpural punishment by 
those whose authorivy it undermined. 
Between 1898 and 1994, the Senda!] and Swettenham-Ashimore adminis- 
trations had inaugurated a Board of Agricuituie, and had begun to give the 
teacheis a knowledge of agricultural science, and to extend it to some of their 
pupils in the vpper standards. But these administrations lost sight of the 
very important fact that the teachers’ salaries for a year depended on the 
result of the short examination day, and that they had naturally to look after 
themselves and sec that the pupils mastered higher arithmetic which, though not 
required by the majority in after-life, was in school-life consiaered by the Codes 
of infinitely greater value than school-gardening. The limited number of 
Industrial Schools had never been fosterea to become rivals of the othe schools ; 
and though Christ Church nobly fought on for a while in this useful direction, 
yet it had to abandon the well-meaning attempt which a sensible administra- 
tion could have easily sustained, developed, and modelled to the needs of the 
colony. And, as irony would have it, legislators of the day, and one of these 
Governors, expressed the desire to have our local education of the practical 
kind given at Booker Washington’s Tuskeegee Institute! But so wedded 
have the teachers become to the “cram ” system that they, as a body, either 
actively oppose or give a very passive support to the proposed system of the 
recently appointed Board of Education, which the Government would de well 
to adopt and modify as experience is acquired. The general good is always 
to be preferred to that of a few individuals ; and statesmen should not be such 
popularity-seekers as to venture the public assertion, for instance, that an 
ex-convict should be a teacher recognised by the Government for the evasion 
of compulsory attendance legislation if some parents are willing to patronise 
his school ; and that school teachers should be free to teach what they please 
in elementary schools, supported entirely by the colony grant-in-aid. Siz 
Walter Egerton would be well advised to alter the constitution of the Board of 
Education, and strengthen the hands of the Government by freedom to put 
in as its representatives men of proper scholastic attainments and liberal minds 
capable of understanding educational systems and needs, and to have them 
assisted by electives of the Combined Court, and a few representatives of the 
interested denominations. Then this Board should get to work to see that the 
elementary education in the colony shoula be such that pupils would not 
as its products be more and more alienated from farming, trades, and menial 
work ; that they would learn steady and consistent work as preferable te 
intermittent spells of stiff labour ; that mutual confidence should exist between 
employer and employee, with the examples before them in childhcot of 
