TECHNICAL EDUCATION. 379 
workman ; it is indispensable to the proper performance of the 
duties of everyone. 
The phrase as we generally meet with it suggests the teaching 
of chemistry, mechanics, applied building construction, &c.; in 
fact the South Kensington syllabus, which no doubt is technical 
education so far as that teaching appeals to and uses facts and 
materials for building up its results. The grand distinction 
between a knowledge of results obtained from books and from the 
materials themselves, using books as merely guides, must never be 
lost sight of. 
At the outset in a child’s career its attention should not be dis- 
tracted in our Board and other schools with a superabundance of 
specific subjects treated as separate branches of knowledge. 
The three R’s must always stand out the all-important trinity 
of education in our Board schools, and if specific subjects are 
introduced, let them have some bearing on the child’s future 
career. For instance, drawing as a science is as much a necessity 
for the workman as either reading, writing, or arithmetic. It is as 
logical, and easier understood than either reading or arithmetic, 
and is of great assistance in the teaching of the latter if properly 
introduced. 
From the official reports there is evidently room for much im- 
provement in our Board schools, but to this improvement the 
parents as well as the responsible officers must contribute. The 
grand improvement will be simplicity ; for if good after results 
are to be expected, higher class skill in teaching must be employed 
on infants, and their progress—or rather apparent progress—must 
be slower and more thorough ; their understandings must never be 
left behind their work. Further on in the higher standards the 
rudimentary subjects must be more carefully taught. Much can 
be done incidentally and through reading in gradually unfolding 
the facts and phenomena of life, without attempting too soon 
dogmatic generalization. 
The manipulative side of the child’s faculties ought to receive 
attention as well as the purely intellectual. To this our present 
schools give much too small attention, especially as nine-tenths of 
the children taught there have to acquire—and the sooner acquired 
the better for them—a rather high standard of this kind of skill. 
A child from his first to his seventh year becomes acquainted with 
all the relations of space, time, form, colour, taste, and the various 
