PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS. 605 
children go to day schools and they keep in touch with home life. If the day 
school is really a boarding school as well, it will be found that there is always a 
differentiation in favour of the boarder, which has a very bad caste effect, just as 
the ‘ modern-side’ boy of any public school suffers in character because he is of a 
lower caste than the classical-side boy. It is usual to remove a stupid classical- 
side boy to the modern side, and every boy on the modern side has a sense of 
injustice. The work of the modern side ought to be much the higher, but it is 
always badly done because the atmosphere is altogether bad. 
It may be said that I am only destructive in my criticism of public schools. I 
think it will be found that I am also constructive, although I acknowledge that 
my sketch needs much filling in. Well, can much more be done in an address 
lasting one hour? I will now try my hand at a little filling in. I have no objec- 
tion to the existence of classical schools something like the present for boys who 
are fond of classics. The average boy will not be asked to attend such a school. 
I feel sure that much greater attention ought to be paid to the teaching of 
English composition, to English poetry and prose, and to English subjects 
generally. I also feel sure that much attention ought to be paid to Natural 
Science, And surely it can do no good for the classical masters to go on sneering 
at Natural Science subjects and calling them ‘stinks’ as they do now. 
I want, however, to speak more particularly of a much higher kind of school, 
which will educate the boy usually called clever and also the boy usually called 
stupid. As I have already remarked, I think that these names may sometimes be 
redistributed. 
The school is one for boys from eleven to sixteen years of age. It ought in no 
way to be connected with any classical school. English subjects will predominate, 
but teaching in Latin and.Greek and modern languages and other alternative 
subjects will be provided, although they will not be forced upon any boy. The 
masters who teach English ought to know enough Latin and Greek and Celtic and 
Old English and modern languages to be able to illustrate the derivation of 
English words through their roots. And they must be well read in English sub- 
jects and fond of English literature. They will make the boys fond of reading 
English, and encourage them to find out what they like best. Some boys will 
take to history and philosophy, some to poetry and imaginative literature. Every 
boy ought to get the best chance of developing his faculties. It may be asked— 
if we cannot make the average boy spend or waste twelve hours a week on Latin, 
what are we to do with him? At all events, now, we keep him dbing something, 
even if it is only marking time. My answer is, you think only of his putting in 
time ; well, then, let him put in his time at work that interests him; any work of 
that kind must be educative under an intelligent master who can help him in his 
studies if it induces him to look up information for himself. Thus, when reading 
travels or history, he will use the globe and raised maps and read geography, 
and hunt up plans of battlefields. Think of the things that a boy used to be 
punished for doing, and let him do those things under wise direction. I used to 
be punished for reading Scott and Cooper. Nowadays prizes are given to boys 
for their knowledge of Ivanhoe or Quentin Durward. Expand this into a system. 
A boy who loves to browse over Chambers’s English Literature ought to be guided 
in his browsing, and induced to take up something more than selections, and he 
may easily be induced to get off selections by heart if his teacher does not show 
his contempt by speaking of such exercises as Rep. [repetition]. 
Let the teacher take a leaf out of our methods of teaching chemistry and 
physics. It has been shown that twenty-five boys doing work in the laboratory dur- 
ing a lesson of an hour and a half or two hours can be managed by one teacher. 
Experimental lectures in a lecture room have now been greatly discarded ; such 
lessons as I speak of take place in the laboratory, but reliance is placed par- 
ticularly upon the personal attention of the teacher being given to each group of 
students in charge of an investigation, the group not being usually greater than 
four in number, and often being less than two. These students are some- 
times merely verifying or testing a statement made by the teacher or found in a 
book, but they are often finding out things for themselves. One idea underlying 
the work is that there ought to be more and more illustrations of simple funda- 
mental principles. It is long before these simple things really become part of a 
boy’s mental machinery; things like the mere definition of force, for example. 
It is, of course, quite different work for the teacher from anything that he used 
