23

H.—l

the University as affiliated institutions, and to assign reasons for our disapproval of that relation. In 1871 the Council of the University of New Zealand, finding itself free to determine the form the University should take, resolved to invite applications from schools or collegiate institutions desiring to he affiliated to the University, and to spend one half of the annual sum at its disposal (£3,000) in aiding the affiliated institutions to establish professorships or lectureships. The object which the Council had in view was " to stimulate educational efforts throughout the colony and among all classes of its community, and to aid and direct those efforts in the successful attainment of a high standard of learning and knowledge of all branches of education." Four institutions —namely, Auckland College and Grammar School, "Wellington College, Nelson College, and the Canterbury Collegiate Union—responded; to the invitation of the University, and were affiliated. The first three were secondary schools, the last was an institution composed of Christ's College, the Canterbury Museum, and the Canterbury Philosophical Institute. An annual sum of £300 was placed by the University at the disposal of each of these institutions. Wellington College employed the grant in establishing a Natural Science Lectureship; Auckland College employed part of its grant for two years in aid of its evening classes; and Canterbury Collegiate Union devoted the whole of its grant to a similar purpose. Nelson College devoted a portion of the grant to the teaching of science, but the greater part to the general purposes of the institution. The original intention of the University Senate in affiliatin"1 these institutions . seems to have been, not to attach secondary schools as such to the University, but; rather to give a University standing to the higher departments of the schools in cases i where they were able to undertake separate and higher work. And this intention • seems at first to have been recognized by the affiliated institutions themselves.' For in the Proceedings of the New Zealand University Senate for 1872 we find that three of these affiliated institutions—namely, Auckland College and Grammar School, Wellington College, and the Canterbury Collegiate Union —■ proposed to satisfy the requirements of the Senate by the institution of separate evening classes. But this intention of separating the higher or University departments of the schools seems to have been soon abandoned both by the University Senate and by the affiliated institutions. In the case of Parnell Grammar School, which was affiliated in 1875, there never has been any attempt to separate University from school work, and the institution seems to have been affiliated simply as a secondary school. At Nelson College the undergraduates receive instruction at the same time with the fifth and sixth forms. At Auckland College the undergraduates and the sixth form work together, the only difference being that the undergraduates obtain occasional help from the masters outside the regular school-hours. At Christ's College, also, which, on the dissolution of the Canterbury Collegiate Union in 1874, was separately affiliated, undergraduates receive the main part of their instruction along with the sixth form. Wellington College has up to the present year given separate instruction to undergraduates by means of evening classes ; but the headmaster, in his report for 1879, proposes that they should be. discontinued. It is evidently impossible successfully to combine school and University work. in the same institution. The experience of the affiliated schools themselves has \ proved that the attempt to do so must end in failure. Not only will the staff be i overtasked, but it is inevitable that either the school or the University work must ] suffer. The University Senate seems to have been alive to this difficulty, and to < have endeavoured to meet it, as far as was possible, by adapting the standard of its degree examinations to the level of school work. Up to the year 1876 all that was required of a candidate for the B.A. degree was that he should pass in three out of eight subjects, his choice being so far limited that he was compelled to take either classics or mathematics as one of his three subjects. In mathematics all that was required was arithmetic, four books of Euclid, elementary algebra, and elementary mechanics (without trigonometry); and in classics the examination was confined to portions of Latin and Greek authors previously

Object of afflliatlon-

institutions affiliated-

Apparent schools as such, }^- Re P-> Evi<3-» 283'

Affiliation of affect*"' *b th the teachers and J^® °f examination,