Page:Hints for the improvement of village schools and the introduction of industrial work.djvu/21

13 small money-payment, as at Finchley, or, as with us, are provided with dinner at the school on certain days of the week. These inducements, coupled with the prospect of obtaining eventually better situations for their children, will naturally have great weight with the parents. One of the chief hindrances in establishing a school such as I have described (a school adapted for farmers' and tradesmen's children, but at the same time providing industrial training for the children of labourers) arises from the difficulty of obtaining suitable teachers, for few of the mistresses who come from the training schools have a sufficient practical knowledge of industrial work, to be able properly to superintend it. I am aware that at some of the institutions, especially at Whitelands, considerable attention has of late been bestowed on the subject of industrial training.

Miss Coutts, with her usual well-considered benevolence, has offered prizes to those students who show the best acquaintance with domestic economy in a written examination, and good results will, no doubt, ensue. Yet I think that the students should be more accustomed actually to work in the laundry, kitchen, and bake-house, so that they may be practically acquainted with every detail connected with those branches of industry.

It is quite a false feeling which would lead a national school mistress to think herself above putting her hands in the wash tub. In most cases superintendence only would be required, since she could not be spared from the school-room, yet as I contemplate the industrial branch being under the general management of the schoolmistress, it is necessary she should know how things ought to be done. As far as head-knowledge is concerned, a really well-trained certificated mistress of the present day would be quite competent to give such an education as farmers and tradesmen require for their children; indeed the mistresses of private boarding schools are usually very inferior both in ability and in the art of imparting knowledge. But besides the difficulty of obtaining teachers for a school such as I have described, the farmers and tradesmen frequently object to sending their children to mix with the dirty, ragged, children of the poor. This objection is not unreasonable; but there is an easy remedy for it in the hands of the managers and teachers of the school. Let them resolutely set their faces against rags and dirt—let the parents be remonstrated with for the former, and the children punished for the latter—let frocks and pinafores be kept at the school and sold to the parents a little under cost price, and in a few months I will undertake to say that both rags and dirt will disappear. It is essential for the success of a school where farmers' and labourers' children are to be educated