8 4 
On Technical Education. 
[February, 
that city, are paid at the rate of 5 d. per hour throughout the 
entire working day, if they are constantly occupied, and the 
occasional labourers are paid at the rate of 6 d. the hour. 
Science teachers, like unscientific people, could not keep 
body and soul together on the rate of remuneration of 
£1 for twenty-eight lessons ; they have therefore — in order 
to eke out what in some cases, after all has been done, will 
amount but to a bare subsistence — to teach in many schools, 
often also many subjects, and to devote an amount of time 
each day to teaching, which is directly in opposition to the 
system pursued in German schools. In the article in the 
February number (vol. v.) it was shown, from the Depart- 
ment’s own Reports, that some of them taught in as many 
as nine different schools. 
The great decrease in the average payment per teacher 
which has taken place within the last few years is, in my 
opinion, a most significant fadt ; it must be due, it appears 
to me, either to the employment at the present time of a 
class of teachers inferior to those employed in 1867, or it 
must be due to the departmental officials cutting down the 
earnings of the teachers, which — according to the late Sir 
Henry Cole, as shown in the January article (vol. v.) — was 
the chief, if not the sole, reason for instituting the payment 
on result system. 
If the decrease in the average payment is due to the pre- 
sent teachers as a body being inferior to those employed in 
1867, it indisputably proves, I think, that the young men, 
who have within the last dozen years or so been not only 
provided through the Department with a scientific education 
free of all cost, but have also been paid by the State — in 
the form of exhibitions, scholarships, &c. — varying sums for 
maintenance during the time they were studying, have not, 
after completing their studies, entered as teachers to any 
appreciable extent under the Department ; otherwise, if the 
decrease in the average payment is not due to the cutting 
down of the teachers’ earnings, but is due to the inefficiency 
of the teaching, it would prove that more efficient teachers 
were to be had before the Department took the training of 
them in hand than since that time. 
The following sums appear in the Estimates for 1883-84 
for exhibitions and maintenance allowances for those of the 
State-aided students who are sent to the Normal Science 
School, South Kensington : — 
