378 REPORT— 1897, 



programme, especially in placing political before physical geography ; and 

 the German philologists and schoolmasters have passed a resolution 

 demanding that geography should be taught in every form or class of the 

 Gymnasium. Other German States have not followed the Prussian 

 authorities in this. 



In the United States of America a committee of ten appointed by the 

 National Education Association to enquire into secondary school studies 

 have recommended that physical geography should receive three hours' 

 teaching per week in the first year of secondary schools (age 14-15). In the 

 fourth year, in all save the classical forms, physiography, in the American 

 sense of the word (i.e. geomorphology), is suggested as an alternative with 

 geology for three hours' work per week. The committee which advised 

 the committee of ten about geographical education have unfortunately 

 neglected advanced geography, except in its physiographic or geomorpho- 

 logical and meteorological aspects. 



B. TRAINING OF SECONDARY SCHOOL TEACHERS 

 IN GEOGRAPHY. 



United Kingdom. — Our secondary schools need trained teachers in 

 geography far more than elaborate programmes. If the training of ele- 

 mentary school teachers leaves much to be desired, it is due not so much 

 to lack of organisation as to deficiencies in the ideals of the responsible 

 authorities. The secondary school master and mistress have had very little 

 chance hitherto of learning any geography, except privately or by going 

 to foreign institution.?. The most important educational work in the 

 immediate future is the provision of proper geographical training for 

 secondary school teachers, a training which will enable them to read maps 

 and think geographically, and not merely to read and reproduce the 

 words of a text-book, to regard geography as an interpretation of a living 

 world and not a catalogue of positions or definitions of directions. 



Most secondary school teachers in this country and abroad are trained 

 in the universities. But only two universities in the United Kingdom 

 recognise geography as an optional subject for the ordinary degree, while 

 a third has made it a minor subject necessary for a degree in History. In 

 none has it the position it occupies in the majority of even the smaller 

 Continental universities. There are facilities for learning some geography 

 at Oxford and Cambridge, and, to a slight extent, at the University Colleges 

 of England and Wales, as is noted in the next section of this report. 

 But it is to be regretted that so few masters and mistresses in our second- 

 ary schools have been trained in modern geographical ideas and methods. 



Other Countries — The German geographers, at their last biennial con- 

 gress at Jena in 1897, protest most strenuously against the deterioration of 

 geographical teaching in Prussia in recent years, owing to the new regula- 

 tions which permit masters untrained in geography to teach it — the normal 

 condition in the United Kingdom. On this matter Dr. H. Wagner, of Got- 

 tingen, says in his report of the proceedings of this Congress in the ' Scottish 

 Geographical Magazine ' (June 1897) : 'Besides the fact that the weekly 

 lessons in geography in the upper classes have been curtailed, a greater 

 evil lies in the practice of the heads of educational institutions to intrust 

 the teaching of geography to masters who have never studied the subject 

 at the university, or submitted their knowledge of this branch of learning 

 to the test of an examination. Dr. Fischer gave ample proofs of this from 



