Dec. 18.] THE NEW ZEALAND GAZETTE. 2303

18. 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 younger children.

19. 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 direct the instruction in primary schools, and to regulate the examination of pupils, 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 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 subjects 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. It is understood that Inspectors will, as far as possible, make themselves acquainted with the way in which the several subjects have been treated, as is more explicitly laid down in regard to history and elementary science, and that they will accordingly be guided in their examination of the several classes by the work actually done during the year.

In all standards the requirements for READING shall be held to include a fair degree of comprehension of the language of the reading lessons and of the subject-matter contained in them. Accordingly, 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 classes 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 relative 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