The Wairarapa Daily. TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 1892.

Wairarapa Daily Times, Volume XIII, Issue 4051, 1 March 1892, Page 2

The Wairarapa Daily. TUESDAY, MARCH 1, 1892.

Last October tho standards in our public schools were re-defined. The whole business was published in tho Gazette in a curious form, somewhat like a sermon in numbered para, graphs, It is not very accurate, nor very scientific, and is in parts quite over the head of the ordinary teacher. It would be beside our purpose to go through it in detail, but a few extracts, chiefly referring to the first standard, may give an idea of the whole. The first standard in an ordinary school generally means a great roomful of little grubby children, aged say seven to ten; they come in straight from their play, and are very incoherent, hot, freckled, and not over clean, The Inspector-General (it was lie who framed these standards; tells us that " Ohms and volts, . atomic weight, the vascular system, and suoh high matters in general" are out of their reach, There seems' a queer jumble of things here. Ohms and volts are as simple as pounds and ! yards to anyone who has a battery; atomic weight is a much more theoretical affair, not at all within children's ken; the vascular system is not a high matter at all, and probably in an ordinary first standard ten per cent, would know that the radial artery beat synchronously with the heaft, though they would wofd it differently. It strikes us that some one has been getting at the Inspector, This is more apparent just before, where he says children can understand why scientific men do not" regard a fish as a whale or a spider as an insect." - Here again, surely he can't know himself? A whale breathes air, has lungs, and has hot blood. Its young, strange as it may seem in tumbling mid ocean, are born alive. We grant children can understand that. But a spider 1 Why not an inseot? The enoyoloptedic editor of this journal may be,aware that the fusion of the eephaljo and thoracic segments does differentiate a spider from a wasp; but wo do not think one teacher in ahuudredwould understand this, nor if he did could he get children to see it. There is no other difference of any importance. breathe air, walk about, catch food, just like Insects,

Now to turn from natural science to geometry, we find that young cbildrenhave "very indefinite ideas," for though they know a square has four sides "their intelligence has to be arouse/] to observe and recognise the qqua'fyy 't/f (1)0 Bides and the sensible character This tea vqrypoor, thin,'p'reacMehtJ ft w,0,u1(l benojWt sonptis in'i jralprt, '.where the blessed IJecomtamia- rarely fails to appeal. Ip y/eek day mpmehtSj if the pensjibl/) phjww of a ;rigbt angle ? This is neither t(te Isnpap of I;tieratur l e nor of science. It will jiavg # jja(J e|ept on a certain class of teachers, who go in for rote knowledge. They will imitate the sound without discovering the kernel of sense, Probably Mr Habens means that if you cross two sticks you can get them into a

position where the angles are equal, or that the corner of one book will just fit on tho comer of any other. But the average teacher would spot the phrase as an examination tip, and ask " 'sybat is the sensible character of ,a right angle ?"; and then toach the children an answer. It 'iwould' be amusing to hear the answer lie teaches them. We shall take it as' a personal favour if Mr Lee will ask the question a few times and report what answer he gets, Some may imagine that Mr Habens intends the teachers to translate all these long words into baby language, but we find in section 20, that in the firat standard"' base,'' apex," altitude' as applied to isosceles triangles must be known," and also the meaning of " isosceles." All this is horribly pedantic, In first rate English eohools, even in high classes, modern teachers prefer, "top" to " apex " and " height" to " altb tude," because these simple terms make the results more apparent. No doubt a sixth form boy at Eton knows it is rather slangy to say the area of a triangle is found by multiplying the bottom by the height and halving the result, but he certainly does often say it rather than " half the produot of the base by the altitude." The general impression given by these standards is that of interminable complexity, of a fatal aptitude for confounding what is diffioalt with what is easy, of an inborn tendency lo substitute the dronings of a diss senting minister for the dear, sharp utterances of a successful teacher. Everyone knows how very little is really taught in our sohoojs; and that little might b'e expressed in. far more simple and accurate language.