SCIENCE IN SECONDARY SCHOOLS. 173 
IV. SCIENCE SCHEME OF A RURAL SECONDARY SCHOOL. 
By Witr1am Axpripcr, Headmaster, Shepton Mallet Grammar School. 
The school in which the work here described is carried on is an old 
endowed Grammar School, founded in 1627, which was reconstituted and trans- 
ferred to new buildings nearly twenty years ago. The commencement of the 
experiment in rural education in this school was coeval with this change, and 
the work has been continued ever since. For the first few years aid was 
given by the County Council alone, but grants were afterwards obtained from 
the Science and Art Department, and ultimately the school came under the 
Board of Education, which, however, refused to give a special grant under 
Article 39 of the Regulations for Secondary Schools, on the ground that the 
work was no longer an educational experiment but was a proved success. 
The scheme has undergone modifications since its inception, but the position 
reached is roughly outlined below, and there is no doubt as to its efficiency 
as @ means of general education. 
7 ae underlying motive of the scheme is to vivify the class-room teaching 
by bringing it into intimate contact with the out-of-school life of the district 
in which the pupils move, thereby making the pupil an interested learner 
developing into an accurate, observant, reasoning, and adaptable man with 
bodily, mental, and spiritual faculties developed to the fullest possible extent. 
The school is situated in a small market-town of 5,000 inhabitants, served 
by two lines of railway. The number of pupils has varied from fourteen at 
the start to eight-five, and now averages about seventy to seventy-five boys, aged 
eight to eighteen, of whom all, except at most half-a-dozen, are day boys. About 
two-thirds of the total come from surrounding towns and villages. The chief 
industries of the locality comprise farming (milk, cheese, butter, and cider 
making, with little arable land), brewing, quarrying, coal-mining, a little 
lime-burning, brick-making, and the manufacture of lace-making machinery. 
The school staff consists of the headmaster and four assistants, who receive 
occasional help in the more technical portions of the science course from the 
county experts in agriculture and horticulture. 
The buildings comprise a main block, including headmaster’s house and 
three class-rooms, cloak-room, &c., and a detached block containing workshop, 
physical and chemical laboratories, lecture-room, balance-room, and _ store- 
rooms. The physical Jaboratory is also used for practical botany, but experi- 
ments in this connection are also set up in the lecture-rooms and chemical 
laboratory. 
Out-of-doors about two-fifths of an acre are devoted to experimental and 
demonstration plots, and there is a meteorological station. Formerly the plots 
included gardens cultivated by individual boys, but they proved to be unsatis- 
factory and of little real educational value, and were ultimately abandoned. 
A model fruit plantation has been substituted. The boys are not called upon 
to do much manual labour in connection with these plots, but they use them 
largely for experimental and observational work. 
For science work the school may be divided into three main divisions— 
Preparatory, Middle, and Upper—and a boy spends an average of three years 
in the Middle Division after reaching the age of twelve years. The following 
is the division of time in ‘class which has been found to give satisfactory 
results :— 
Preparatory Division, 8-12 years old.—Religious knowledge, 15 hour per 
week; English subjects, including reading, writing, spelling, grammar, composi- 
tion, history, geography, 15 hours; arithmetic, 7 hours; physical exercises 
(excluding organised games), 3 hour; art and music (singing), 2 hours; 
science, 15 hour. 
Middle Division, 12-15 years.—Literary subjects, including religious know- 
ledge, English, geography, history, 74 hours; mathematics, 6 hours; language 
(French), 3 hours; manual avd physical training (apart from organised 
games), 3 hours; science, 6 hours; art and music 24 hours. 
