Number of
Children.

Number of Schools

and Children.

Statistics of the Schools.

The whole number of schools in the Southern District, whether of boys, girls, or infants, which, under these circumstances, I have inspected, is 134, they are situated in 88 different localities; and I found 6213 children assembled in them, of whom 3342 were boys and 2872 girls.

The following table contains the results of an inquiry I have made as to the ages of the children in 75 of these schools:

Under 7 Years

of Age.

From 9 to 10.

Between
7 and 8.

1,035 945 801 587 386 193 87

7,549

0.6 15.36 13.7 12.5 10.6 7.77 5.12.55 1.16 9.

From this table, it appears that very nearly one-half of the children in these schools were under eight years of age, and that out of every 100 children 82 were under 11 years of age, and 60 of these under 9 years.

Religious Knowledge.

I had scarcely entered upon my duties when, by the operation of the "Recent Minutes," they were limited to schools which sought the appointment of pupil teachers, and they have since left me in ignorance of all others. Of the state of education generally in the Southern District I am not therefore competent to speak.

With reference to the schools that I have visited, I can bear testimony to great activity and zeal on the part of all persons connected with them to promote the education of the children; but it would be an injustice not to record that this remark is specially, and in peculiar manner, applicable to the parochial clergy, by whose voluntary contributions the schools are in this, as in other agricultural districts, chiefly, and sometimes wholly maintained, and to whose laborious teaching, in the dearth and paucity of other duly instructed teachers, they not unfrequently owe whatever of efficiency they may be found to possess.

If I have been more struck by this circumstance in my recent than in any previous tour of inspection, I am disposed to attribute

it to the support which the cause of education has received from the Lord Bishop of the diocese, to the influence of your Lordships' Recent Minutes," and to the exertions of my predecessor, Archdeacon Allen.

66

The labours of the clergy are, of course, chiefly limited to the instruction of the children in Religious knowledge, and if Religious knowledge constituted a Religious education, there are some of the schools I have visited in which those who are the best friends of education, and seek its highest results, could have little left to desire.

In not less than 100 of these schools out of 134 I believe, however, that the children are taught to read, mechanically, from the Scriptures, the sacred volume itself being used for that purpose, or parts extracted from it. I have nowhere found this constant reading of the Scriptures associated with real scriptural knowledge, except where, in addition to this, the Scriptures are made the subject of a special course of instruction. It is a result, indeed, to which the learning to read mechanically from the Scriptures does not appear at all to contribute, but the reverse. Ideas of the same class presented incessantly to the mind under the same circumstances lose at length their interest, and the repetition of them, instead of strengthening the impression they leave, tends (a certain limit being passed) to confuse it. It is consistent with my own experience, and I believe with that of all other Inspectors, that there is most religious knowledge in those schools where the reading of the Scriptures is united in a just proportion with secular instruction, and where a distinction between the functions of the day-school and the Sunday-school being observed, something of that relation is established in the school between religious principles and secular pursuits which ought to obtain in the after-life of the child.

That is no ordinary sacrifice which is made of the veneration due to the word of God, when it is constantly applied to a secular use. Looking at a religious education as comprising, in its largest sense, the whole result for which we are labouring, it is impossible not to lament that, by an indiscretion which has no parallel in the education we give to our own children, we so associate the use of the Scriptures with the years a labourer's child spends at school as to render the neglect of them a probable result when he leaves it, and that the teaching of the school is, for the most part, so limited to the letter of Scripture as to place the child, by defect of secular knowledge, beyond the reach of that instruction which the Church has afterwards provided for him.*

I am discouraged when I find the opinions of men, whose piety

Is it to be wondered at if, under these circumstances, the influence of the Church should be felt chiefly among the educated portions of the community, or if localities are to be found where ample means of elementary instruction have long been provided without any sensible effect on the moral or religious condition of the population?

I have learned to venerate, and whose zeal for the cause of education I cannot doubt, identified with the prejudices of another class of persons who insist upon this limitation, not altogether (as they themselves admit) that poor children may know the Scriptures, but lest they should know anything else.

As I have reason to believe that your Lordships will not rest satisfied with any form of elementary education which does not include the solid instruction of the people in all those elements of secular knowledge which are adapted to their necessities and suited to their condition, I have considered it expedient to show that such a form of instruction is so far from being incompatible with that higher view of the functions of education which assigns the first place and a paramount importance to the religious training of youth, that these have to one another a necessary relation and a mutual dependence.

Secular Instruction.

The following table contains a general statement of the results at which I have arrived, in regard to the instruction of the children in secular knowledge :

Number of Schools Number of Schools Number of Schools Number of Schools Number of Schools

in which 6,213

Children were

present at

in which

Examination.

Geography is
taught.

in which Grammar is

in which English History

in which Vocal Music is

taught.

is taught.

taught.

Reading. According to this statement, out of 6213 children 1078 could read in the Bible with tolerable ease and correctness, being 1 in 53. This is a larger proportion than I found in the schools of the Midland districts. It is necessary however to add, that it is a proportion not recorded under the same circumstances. The time occupied in the examination of candidate pupil teachers has not, in very many cases, permitted me to examine the rest of the children with the same care as heretofore, and I have thought it better, under these circumstances, to take the statistics of education in each school from the mouth of the teacher. If I had referred the reading of the children to the same standard as in the other schools I have inspected, it is probable that I should have arrived at the same result, and that the proportion of 1 in 5%, referred to the standard of the teachers, would have become 1 in 6 or 7, in the hands of the Inspector. Nearly one-half of the children are, however, capable of reading easy passages from the Gospels. The remaining third are learning letters or monosyllables.

Penmanship.-Nothing tends more than good penmanship to create among the poor a public opinion favourable to the school. I have therefore regretted to find that whilst one-third of these children learn to write upon paper, but little attention is paid to good writing.

Writing from Dictation.-Writing from dictation is commonly practised in the upper classes on the slate, very rarely on paper; and yet I have found in the examination of pupil teachers, that the same child who can write well from a copy, and spell well on a slate from dictation, can neither write well nor spell well from dictation on paper.

Arithmetic. I have no favourable impression to record of the skill exhibited by the children I examined in arithmetic. A little more than one-half of them were learning the first four simple

rules, 1 in 10 had advanced to the compound rules, and 1 in 19 to Proportion. Very few were, however, able to write down correctly in figures a number which I dictated to them ;* and it is not often that I have succeeded in getting a sum of money correctly multiplied by a number of one figure.

Correctness and facility, and even rapidity of computation in the simpler rules of arithmetic, is, I think, attainable in elementary teaching; and to this there may be superadded, as the experience of some of our best schools has shown, that knowledge of the principles of arithmetic which associates its reasons with its rules, and makes a fusion into the four first, of all the rules above them.†

English history is taught to 1 in 11 of the children, and in 28 out of 63 of the schools I have visited, and Geography to 1 in every 5 of the children, and in 44 of these 63 schools.

It is wonderful what a flood of light a little instruction, often the most technical and commonplace, in these subjects lets into the minds of poor children. In schools where the teaching of them is looked upon as the privilege of the wealthier classes, or as dangerous and out of the province of a National school, or where for any other cause it has been neglected, I have not unfrequently found the children unable to tell me the name of the sovereignt or of the country, or of any other country. When asked what was the greatest city in England, they have named the neighbouring market town; for the four quarters of the globe, they have given me the four points of the compass, and have told me that the Queen of England was Queen also of France, and that the people of Scotland were black. Their home education leaves them ignorant of these and a thousand other things, the knowledge of which is nevertheless necessary to a right intelligence of the relation in which we stand to one another, and to the Government of the country, but which we never think of teaching our own children, because they pick them up from the ordinary intercourse of society.

I have appended to my Report a table, in which are stated in detail the results of my inspection of each school.

In one of the schools in my district (that of King's Somborne) an educational experiment has for the last five years been trying, which

*Ten thousand and ten. I do not believe that 1 child in 20 could write down this number.

The following solution of a sum in the Rule of Three may be taken as an illustration of this process.-Ex. If 7 yards of cloth cost 298., what will 9 cost? Since 7 yards cost 29s., therefore 9 times 7 yards must cost 9 times 29 or 261 shillings; therefore 9 times 1 yard must cost the 7th part of 261 shillings, or 11. 17s. 34d. In which process, whilst the reason of each step is made apparent, the same arithmetical operations are performed as though it had been worked by the ordinary method of the Rule of Three, the reason of which no child can understand. This method, rendered unintelligible by a misprint in my Report for 1845, appears better adapted to the use of elementary schools than that usually given with the same object, according to which the value of 1 yard would first be determined, and thence the value of 29 yards; a method which supposes a previous knowledge of fractional arithmetic.

This was the case in the Windsor National school, in the first class of which there were only two or three children who knew the Queen's name.