Education. 



402 



Nov. 1906. 



followed by silent but stolid revolt against manual and industrial work, and very 

 insufficient measures had been taken by those who were responsible to break the 

 violence of the transition from forced labour to free citizenship. Tropical climate 

 did not stimulate physical exertion ; tropical luxuriance made continuous effort to 

 secure bare subsistence almost superfluous. The discipline of the years of slavery 

 had not tended to organise home life or to implant ambition towards the attainment 

 of personal comfort. Whatever the changes and chances of life had been, food had 

 been secure, and the emancipated peasant could not foresee the day when food might 

 fail. As remuneration diminished, his service became more intermittent; he 

 acquiesced in the oppression of outside circumstances or blamed the governing 

 classes. When the neighbouring planter endeavoured to improve his living by 

 improved machinery or more economical production, it was only the economy effected 

 by reducing the price of labour that caught his observation ; he saw no need himself 

 to make two blades of grass grow where one had grown before. 



Besides, while the great majority of the peasantry were outside of the range 

 of educational influences, the few who had come under them thought that education 

 meant nothing but book work of a conventional literary type ; the schools were 

 the children of the Churches, and one of their main objects was to teach people to 

 read the Bible. With the best intentions they foredoomed themselves to failure by 

 dissociating themselves from the home life and home interests of their scholars. 

 The ministers themselves, full of zeal for the bettering of the conditions of life among 

 the people, were mostly men in whom the educational traditions of the Reformation 

 lingered on, or were drawn from the class of social reformers, at one time a large 

 class in England, who firmly believed that increased knowledge was the only leverage 

 needed to elevate the masses. The ministers were the men of superior education 

 with whom the labouring classes had most intimate contact ; they were able to live 

 by their education. Small wonder then has it been that we found the general 

 population and teachers alike needing a change of ideal as complete as those classes 

 in America whom General Amstrong at Hampton and Booker Washington at 

 Tuskegee have been trying to convert. 



It is not surprising that in the face of this situation there is not as much in 

 the way of practical agriculture in the schools in Jamaica to report as one might 

 wish ; perhaps there are hardly 100 schools now with school gardens and very many 

 of those have been lately started. But I believe (and I have excellent opportunity 

 for judging sanely) that there has been very considerable change in the attitude of 

 the geueral population on the subject. We need perhaps to alter somewhat the 

 conditions under which we offer the special grant for practical work, and a Com- 

 mittee is now considering this particular point. We have done what I think is the 

 more difficult work of prepariug the ground. 



IMPROVING THE TEACHER. 



The means by which we have succeeded in getting this encouraging change 

 seem to have been in the main these : — 



First, we have gone some way in making school agriculture attractive by 

 improving the teacher's power to teach. No one can teach with enthusiasm what he 

 does not know, and we had learnt that industrial and agricultural teaching power 

 cannot be improvised. In our Training College course Latin and the higher mathe- 

 matical work have been struck out ; additional importance has been given to the 

 science subjects, and particularly elementary agricultural science ; more importance 

 also to the professional subject of school management and the practice of teaching 

 in the practising schools. At the Female Training College at Shortwood an interest- 

 ing departure has been made in admitting a certain number of the girls, who fail 

 in the competitive entrance examination, to a year's probation for domestic service 



