Untitled

GOVKKNMKNT SCHOOLS. 47lines. Gratuitous teaching of one or two hours a day,merely for the love of it, and with the desire to advancethe cause of modern education, indicates a real zeal on thepart of the young men. These private schools mustcontinue yet for some time before sufficient provision canbe made by the Government for the instruction of allpupils, thus rendering them unnecessary. The idealplan for elementary schools is to make them free to allcomers, and when this is carried into effect the privateschools will cease to exist.In an address before the Educational Associationseveral years ago, I alluded to a plan providing Readersfor the teaching of the Chinese language which wasbeing carried on at Nanyaiig College at that time. Myreference to the subject elicited the keenest interest fromthe members of the Association, and I received mainenquiries, at that time and subsequently, concerningwhat we were doing. At the present time, such Readersare so common as to cause younger teachers to imaginethat they had always been in use. In all modernschools they have replaced the former clumsy method otteaching the language by memorizing the Classics. Theyhave made itpossible for a child to learn to recogni/tcharacters much more quickly than formerly, and to beable to put these characters together into simple .sentences. The introduction of these Readers has markeda decided progress in the advance of universal education,as they have made easier the stupendous task of mastering the knowledge of Chinese written characters. Thetendency of these modern schools is toward a moresimple method of expression, but it yet remains to beseen whether their methods will be able to produce asufficient number of writers of the style required forofficial documents and books. Those trained in earliermethods consider the scholarship of those being trainedin modern methods shallow and superficial. Timealone can show whether this opinion is founded uponprejudice or fact. It is possible that, in the stress of