education whatever.
Other remarkable compromises had also to be made with thespirit of
the age. The unfortunate conflict between Religion and Science
prevalent at this time was mitigated, if Iremember rightly, by
making graduates in arts and priests in the established church
Science Teachers EX OFFICIO, and leaving local and private
enterprise to provide schools, diagrams, books, material, according
to the conceptions of efficiency prevalent in the district. Private
enterprise made a particularlygood thing of the books. A number of
competing firms of publishers sprang intoexistence specialising in
Science and Art Department work; they setthemselves to produce
text-books that should supply exactly the quantity and quality of
knowledge necessary for every stage of each of five and twenty
subjects into whichdesirable science was divided, and copies and
models and instructions that should give precisely the method and
gestures esteemed as proficiency in art. Every section of each book
was written in the idiom found to be mostsatisfactory to the
examiners, and test questions extracted from papers set in former
years were appended to every chapter. By means of these last the
teacher was able to train his class to the very highest level of
grant-earning efficiency, and very naturally he cast all other
methods of exposition aside. First he posed his pupils with
questions and then dictated model replies.
That was my father's method of instruction. I attended his classes
as an elementary grant-earner from the age of ten until his death,
and it is so Iremember him, sitting on the edge of a table,
smothering a yawn occasionally and giving out the infallible
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