Education in British Guana. 115 
teachers and their employers ; that teachers should have every inducement to 
love teaching and to make good citizens for the State ; that zeal and industry, 
obedience to authority and respectfulness, truthfulness and honour are essen- 
tial qualities and of more value to the individual than any scraps of knowledge, 
even if they included languages or mathematics. A howl will be raised against 
this by a few self-seekers, but what are they in comparison with the masses 
to be benefited by a strictly rational and adequate system of education ? Few 
men will honestly attempt to gainsay the fact that the present system has 
caused the ranks of the unemployed of the colony to be swelled out of all 
proportion ; many of our leading colonists know that industrious, hard-working 
parents of the labouring classes again and again confess that their children 
on leaving the schools cannot get a start in life, being above their respective 
stations in life with their lofty ideas of the book knowledge acquired in school, 
and being quite below that to which they unworthily aspire. Of course, care 
must be taken to give the clever boys and girls every chance of rising to the 
higher places in the world, a benefit not only to themselves, but also to the 
colony. In 1894 Mr. Howell Jones, C.M.G., got Primary Scholarships in- 
augurated to effect this ; and the Government need only carry out the recom- 
mendations of the Committee which sat three years ago to bring the scheme 
up to present requirements, and to save the constant waste of the Scholarship 
for private schools. 
The Hodgson administration has to its credit the inauguration of the much 
needed Board of Education, with far more limited powers than was sought for 
it in the Combined Court, and with quite a different composition to what was 
expected. Undoubtedly, the next administration will develop that Board 
as occasion requires; and all the educational needs of the colony, whether 
classical or scientific, technical or agricultural, will come under the sway of 
a single body, and that body should be the Board of Education, composed 
of a larger number if necessary, but with the Government always distinctly 
in the majority. 
Security of office to teachers is actively engaging the minds of the majority 
of the interested, and it is to be hoped that the Government will early make 
that un fait accompli. Surely that need not clash with the denominational 
system, for so close at hana as in Barbados we find an example of the two 
co-existing. No assistant teachers should be allowed at two or three dollars 
a month under any plea, for this practice is not only immoral, but also adverse 
tu State economy, making inhabitants enter unremunerative channels from 
which they can hardly be extricated. 
Our elementary system of education should aim at inculcating in the young 
minds the dignity of manual labour, and it should be so arranged as to give 
our youth the taste for farming and trades, for domestic work and dairying’ 
Steadily before their gaze should be kept the independence that can be s« 
acquired, and every assistance should be given them to make themselves good 
farmers and artisans, thrifty housekeepers and domestics. The Board of 
Industrial Training, which owes its birth also to the Hodgson regime, is doing 
excellent work with its evening continuation classes for apprentices and others ; 
