Page:Reports on the State of Education in Bengal (1835 & 1838).djvu/102

32 Bible, and a comprehensive outline of the evidences and leading doctrines of Christianity. The conductors of the institution deem it essential to keep steadily in view the promotion of knowledge and the spread of education on Christian principles.

The modes of tuition and discipline introduced into this seminary are those which wore employed and, as far I am aware, first reduced to a system by Mr. Wood in the sessional school of Edinburgh. It is called the interrogative system, and consists in keeping up the spirit and attention of the scholars by a continual succession of questions and familiar examples, varied in every possible way likely to interest and amuse them and to engage their minds in their work. Particular care is taken that in the course of reading the pupils not only give the meaning in which a word is used, but trace it to its origin and mention as many of its compounds as they can recollect. No class is left idle for a moment, and to effect this object the lower classes are chiefly taught by the boys of the first class, who are relieved when they have to attend to their own lessons by the boys of the second, while all are under the constant superintendence and occasional examination, repeated several times every day, of the European head-teachers who also have several assistant-teachers under them. At the close of the day, the place which each boy occupies in his class is marked in a list, where an account is also kept of all those who have been absent and late, so that to determine each boy’s comparative place nothing further is necessary than to look at the lists of the last year, and in this way the prizes are decided. On every Saturday there is a general examination of the boys in all they have done during the week, and at the end of every month a certain number of questions on the month’s work in all its branches is written out and asked of each boy apart from the rest. These questions are indiscriminately selected and not by the person who teaches the department to which they relate, the teachers putting them alternately. The effect of this system in awakening and guiding the mind to the fit exercise of its intellectual powers and moral capacities, is found abundantly to answer the expectations of those who have adopted it.

Besides this elementary department there is to be attached to the institution a branch, having in view the higher object of qualifying native youth to become the instructors of their