1124 THE NEW ZEALAND GAZETTE. [No. 75]

of a pupil's progress; also it is to be understood that the examination
report and inspection report, taken together, and not either of them alone,
will express the Inspector's full judgment on the character and efficiency
of the school.

15. The Inspector shall be at liberty to conduct the examination of a
    school in his own way—by written papers, or vivâ voce; by putting all the
    questions himself, or allowing the teacher of a class, or the head of a
    school or of a department, to put all the questions or some of them; by
    subjecting each pupil in a class to a separate examination, or by putting
    questions to the several pupils in the class in rotation, and letting them
    "take places" or marking the values of their individual answers; and so
    on. In the exercise of his judgment in such matters, the Inspector will,
    of course, have regard to the different characters of the several subjects,
    and will remember that methods properly applicable to the examination of
    boys and girls of fourteen may be quite out of place in the case of children
    of eight or nine.

16. In the interpretation of the syllabus, inspectors and teachers will
    be guided by the following statement of its design, and of its aims in
    general and in detail. It is designed to regulate the instruction and the
    examination of pupils in primary schools, most of whom are children, and
    the oldest of them in the stage of early youth. When terms are used in
    defining the subjects of primary school instruction that are also used in
    defining parts of an examination for teachers, it is not expected that the
    children will be able to attain to such a mastery of these subjects as it
    is necessary for their teachers to have. Questions that would be fair
    in a degree paper might be quite unfair if proposed in the same subject
    to candidates for matriculation; and the children of a third-standard
    class may have some useful elementary knowledge of matters that, in
    some aspects, are occupying the diligent attention of specialists in modern
    science. The profitable instruction of children and youths is naturally
    limited by their intelligence—childish intelligence or youthful intelligence,
    as the case may be; any teaching that does not keep within the limits
    thus prescribed by nature is worse than useless, and examination that does
    not respect these limits is unreasonable. On the other hand the chief end
    of the instruction imparted in the primary school is the exercise and
    development of the pupil's intelligence, and the employment of it in the
    acquisition of useful knowledge. If any part of the syllabus seems to
    indicate a tendency to encourage what is mechanical or superficial at the
    expense of intelligence, it is only because, through some defect in the
    letter, the spirit and the real meaning have not been as clearly manifested
    as they ought to have been.

The subject-matter of all READING lessons, and especially of passages
used as examination tests, must be such as the pupils under instruction or
examination can easily understand, and the Inspector will not be satisfied
with any reading that does not convey to his mind the assurance that the
pupil does understand the passage read. Mere utterance of the printed
words will not suffice; there must be such intonation and emphasis as are
required to express the meaning and spirit of the passage: this must be
insisted on, even in the first standard. Proper emphasis and tone proceed
naturally from a true apprehension of the meaning, and are not acquired by
following arbitrary and artificial rules. A first-standard pupil is capable of
feeling the simple humour or the simple pathos of a simple story, and of
understanding the point of it, and his feeling and understanding will affect
his utterance as naturally in reading as in free speech, unless he has been
educated into a false manner by being frequently set to read unsuitable
matter, passing his comprehension and containing nothing to interest him.
In the upper standards the quality of the reading affords one of the surest
means of judging of the intelligence of the pupils, and of the degree of culture
to which they have attained. The good readers will not be those who never
read except in class, but those who have formed the habit of private reading;
who can follow with ease the relations of the parts of a complex sentence,
the thread of a simple argument, or the plot of an interesting story; who
know how to employ in their own spoken and written composition rela-
tive sentences and concessive conjunctions: to whose understanding every
turn of thought and expression appeals with familiar force; and who,
because their thought and feeling respond to every reasonable demand
made upon them by the writer, are able to make his meaning their own
for the time being, and to make that meaning clear by appropriate tones
of voice. Such readers will be independent of mechanical rules for the
observance of "stops." Their reading will be rhetorical in the best sense,
though not histrionic. They will be more indebted to their teacher for
the correction of false habits than for the formation of a correct style, for
a correct style consists chiefly in the use of turns of voice that are not
conventional but perfectly natural, depending only on an adequate concep-
tion of the writer's spirit and meaning. There is no need to question