Page:Adam's reports on vernacular education in Bengal and Behar, submitted to Government in 1835, 1836 and 1838.djvu/340

280 teach, and who is ignorant of the most approved modes of conveying instruction to others, it is indispensable to devise means for communicating that description of qualification to native teachers.

There are three modes in which this object may be, less or more, perfectly attained, and three occasions on which each mode, respectively, may be usefully employed.

The first mode is by written directions verbally explained. Every school-book prepared and distributed under the orders of Government will contain well-digested practical directions, clearly and simply expressed, for the guidance of teachers in the use they are to make of it for the instruction of their scholars; and the directions will be minutely and verbally explained by the examiner when he puts the book in to their hands.

The second mode is by practical example. In the periodical examinations of teachers—and of their scholars too, according to a part of the plan yet to be developed—such an arrangement of details will be adopted as may present a fit example for the imitation of the whole body of native teachers. According to the plan, these examinations will probably occur once every month in the same district and twice a year in the same part of the district. It is, therefore, important that such arrangements should be made for these frequently recurring exhibitions as will afford a lesson of simplicity, order, quiet, promptitude, and general efficiency; and the attention of native teachers should be drawn to the mode of conducting them that they may derive any practical hints which good sense and experience may enable them to apply to their own institutions. The spirit of these examinations also—the superior importance attached to practical knowledge and moral excellence above mere form and routine, intellectual display, or metaphysical subtilty—may be reasonably expected to give some tone to the character and instructions of the native teachers.

The third mode is by precept and example combined in normal schools. I am satisfied that the two modes previously mentioned, although they may be partially beneficial, are inadequate, and that it is only by the third mode that teachers can be thoroughly qualified for their important functions. They have been suggested because no form or mode of useful influence directly attainable should be neglected, and because, without further experience, it may be feared that they are the only modes in which the majority of teachers will at present submit to be guided on such a subject. The attempt, however, should be made to employ the most efficient means, and with that view there should be a normal school for teachers in every district in which the plan now proposed is introduced. For this purpose, adhering to the principle of building on existing institutions, whether new or old, I propose to connect by friendly relations the long-established vernacular schools of the country with those which have been