AGENCY DEPARTMENT. · The Editor regrets the obligation to omit several notices of public examinations and interesting details of progress, owing to a press of matter. REMOVAL OF TEACHERS. Mr. W. Beaumont to Bournemouth. Mr. T. North from Grimsby to Woodley. Mr. G. Thornley from Irwell to Salford. Miss E. Stevenson to Fenstanton. BRITISH TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION. Ar the quarterly meeting of this Association, held at the Training College, Borough Road, on Saturday, November 12, J. G. Fitch, Esq., M.A., formerly Principal of the Training College, and now one of H. M. Inspectors of Schools and Assistant Commissioner under the Endowed Schools Act, delivered an address on the "Endowed Schools Act considered in relation to the work and prospects of Elementary Teachers." There was a very large gathering of British teachers, together with several of the leading Church and Wesleyan teachers of the metropolis, and the students in training at the British and Foreign School Society's colleges. We are able to furnish from the shorthand notes of one of the students of the college the following report of Mr. Fitch's address. J. C. Curtis, Esq., Principal of the Training College and President of the Association, after the reading of the minutes by the Secretary, Mr. A. F. Smith, called upon Mr. Fitch, who was received with great applause. Mr. Fitch said although the subject of the Endowed Schools Act appeared to be rather remotely connected with their ordinary work and duties, he hoped to show that it had a very direct relation to the work in which his auditors were engaged. He thought it probably unnecessary for him to enter into any elaborate details respecting the history and origin of the Endowed Schools Act; notwithstanding, for the sake of those to whom that history might not be quite familiar, he ventured to assume that a short account of it would not be unwelcome to them. They must be aware that during some years past there had been a good many official inquiries on a very large scale into the condition of education in England. There was more than ten years ago the Duke of Newcastle's commission, which had for its object an investigation into the state of popular education in the country. Every one present knew how influential was the report of that commission, and what important fruit it had borne for good or for evil in subsequent legislation. Then there was the commission presided over with conspicuous ability by Lord Clarendon, having for its object an inquiry into the condition of the nine great public schools. It was found after both these commissions had presented their reports, that between the field covered by the one inquiry and that occu pied by the other, there remained a very large area to which no inquiries had reached, and accordingly a third commission was instituted in 1865, under the presidency of the late Lord Taunton, with instructions to ascertain what was the condition of popular instruction in all those schools lying between the great public schools on the one hand and the primary schools on the other. The special attention of these commissioners was directed by her Majesty to the endowed grammar schools of the country. That commission made an exceedingly elaborate report, which, though voluminous, was received with singular favour by the public. The first volume, which contained the general conclusions of the commissioners, and those parts of the remaining volumes which had special reference to particular districts, had been very widely read. Its publication was followed by legislation in a remarkably short space of time, and the Act of Parliament which Mr. Forster introduced in 1869 went through both Houses with singular unanimity. The new commission constituted by the Act was not one of inquiry or criticism, but a legislative commission, with very large powers to reorganise the educational trusts of the country, to amalgamate those trusts which may be considered to require such union, and to frame schemes for improving the administration and educational character of the various schools. The commission is composed of three persons of considerable eminence-Lord Lyttleton, who took a very prominent share in the previous commission of inquiry; Mr. Arthur Hobhouse, a Chancery lawyer of very high standing; and Canon Robinson, a clergyman well known to many of the audience as formerly the Principal of one of the Yorkshire training colleges. These have already begun their work, in which they are of course mainly guided by the report and the recommendations of the old Schools Inquiry Commission. To teachers generally it was interesting to inquire what was the policy of the commission, and what changes in regard to popular instruction might be reasonably anticipated from its action. In the first place the commissioners accepted as the guiding principle of their policy, that one most important recommendation of the old commissioners as to the grading of schools. Nothing was more evident to them when engaged in that inquiry than that schools often failed altogether to fulfil any useful purpose because they undertook to do two or three different kinds of work under the same roof. He had visited many schools calling themselves grammar schools, bound by their statutes to teach Latin and Greek, and containing perhaps forty or fifty scholars, and on inquiry it appeared that only two or three were learning those languages, while the rest were getting an education entirely inferior to that which is obtainable in elementary schools. It was evident that great evil arose from the fact that those schools attempted to do two kinds of work in their very nature inconsistent. In the same school justice cannot be done to the claims of a boy going to the university and to the claims of another boy going to enter into practical life at the age of fourteen or fifteen. Therefore the general recommendation of the commissioners was that these schools should be divided into three distinct grades. The third or lowest grade should be that which would take the whole stratum of society just above the children of the primary school. The scholars of such schools might be characterised generally as children who would pursue their education till about the age of fourteen or fifteen, and whose parents would be ready to pay a reasonable fee, and who would require a sensible English education, of the same general character as that given in a good British school, but carried on to a rather greater extent, and having in it of course the elements of science and probably one modern language. Above this the commissioners think there should be a second-grade school, which should keep its pupils till they were sixteen or seventeen years old, and should aim at giving them a thoroughly generous, hightoned education, including many subjects not necessarily connected with the duties of the counting-house or the shop, but of a practical and scientific nature, and one or two modern languages. It should not at any rate attempt Greek, and should not pretend to prepare its pupils for the universities. Above these schools the commissioners recommended that there should be schools of the first grade, which should keep boys till they are seventeen or eighteen years old, which should charge the highest fees, and which should lay themselves out to meet whatever may be the curriculum of the universities from time to time. It is the duty of the commissioners first of all to ascertain how many first-grade schools are really wanted. It is manifest that the number of schools professing to prepare boys for the universities is much too large. It is therefore the policy of the commissioners to reduce the number of such schools, to make them strong and efficient, and to facilitate access to them from all the lower schools. He wished incidentally to observe that the curriculum of the universities had undergone very great change of late years. There was a time when adequate preparation for Oxford was to be obtained in a small grammar school, under an erudite man who taught Latin and Greek to half a dozen boys. Wherever he went he found masters recalling with great affection the memory of what had been done in old days, and of the university distinctions which had been won by the boys from these small schools. But such a mode of teaching was very wasteful as regards teaching power. Moreover in these days, when the curriculum of the universities has been very considerably widened, and when the principle of competition has been introduced, a boy cannot hope to get an adequate preparation for a successful university career under the care of one scholarly man in a little school. The preparation he wants is better obtained in a large school where there is a great variety of good teachers, each especially distinguished in his own department. And as to all the schools which cannot hope to fulfil these conditions, it becomes necessary to forbid any attempt at the preparation of pupils for the university, and to compel them to accept their position as modern schools. Whether that position be that of second or third-grade school depends of course partly upon the amount of the endowment, partly upon the nature of the educational needs of the population by which the school is surrounded. In considering the requirements of the country as a whole it is obvious that the schools of the first grade will be the least numerous, and those of the third grade the most numerous. But besides these there are scattered all over the country numerous endowments which were never intended to give higher education at all, and yet were within the purview of the Act. In dealing with these it is to be considered that we have now in England, for the first time in our history, a public provision, for which the State has made itself responsible, for the education of the poor. The great measure of Mr. Forster, passed in the recent session, is intended to bring elementary education at a very cheap rate within the reach of every poor man. The poor are the only class of the community for whom this provision is made. When therefore the needs of the classes above them are compared with those of the poor, it will be seen that the former are now relatively the more destitute in the matter of education. In old days, when these endowments were left, they were the only form of provision which existed for the education of the poor. Now they are to a great extent superfluous, indeed they are worse than superfluous, for over and over again he had gone to country villages where he had often found fifty or sixty boys and girls under an untrained master in an uninspected school, giving no guarantees of efficiency from year to year, sustained without any help from the neigbouring gentry, and often without any contributions from the parents. The consequence was that as a rule the endowed elementary schools are greatly inferior to the unendowed. He hoped that every elementary school would hereafter come under the provisions of the new Act, and would fulfil the conditions which that Act imposes. Now an elementary school which has no endowment sustains itself from three distinct sources,-the children's pence, the subscriptions or rates of the richer local residents, and the Government grant. If the endowment be also used, then pro tanto, one or more of the three must be diminished. Which should be diminished? Experience proved that to relieve the parents of their payment would be extremely mischievous. To use it in relief of the Government grant would be to make a present of the local endowment to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and at the same time to deprive the village of the stimulus which the visit of H. M. Inspector gives it. Whether the endowment should be allowed in any degree to supersede the contributions of the local gentry, either in the form of rates or of voluntary subscriptions, is an extremely difficult question. To use it for that purpose would be practically to put money into the pockets of the richer people, instead of to help the poor. Nevertheless, where the former have been demoralized by the possession of an endowment for centuries, and have thus lost all sense of responsibility to their poorer neighbours, he supposed the habit of giving could not be created at once, and that the commissioners would perhaps make some temporary concession on that point. But the old plan of using an endowment indiscriminately as a contribution to the general funds of an elementary school would be extremely wasteful, and would tend to keep down the efficiency of the school. For the future he hoped that the Endowed Schools Commission would find means of converting every such endowment to some form which would make the place possessing it better, richer, and more fully equipped in educational apparatus than the neighbouring town or village which does not possess an endowment. Considerable use can then still be found for endowments in connection with elementary work, either in the form of special prizes or of little exhibitions tenable in the school itself, and designed to encourage a longer stay in school, or of some additional books or apparatus. Mr. Fitch then quoted Clause 30 of the Act, under which miscellaneous charities might, under certain conditions, be converted into educational endowments. Scattered all over the country are many mischievous doles and charity funds, loaves of bread on Sunday, half-crowns at Easter, coals and stockings on St. Michael's day, and many other gifts which betray the poor into habits of exaggeration and falsehood, and which are not unfrequently administered for political and party purposes. There is thus a very large range for the exercise of the powers of the Commission. They have to deal not merely with the endowments which were expressly designed for higher education, but with all the endowments which are educational in any sense of the word, and a great number which are not educational but which may easily become so under the operation of the Act. With reference to the distribution of the endowments, which was undoubtedly somewhat capricious, the richest places having often the greatest amount of endowments, while many great towns, e. g., Plymouth and Hull, are wholly unprovided. It would probably not be necessary to make very large changes. It would of course be necessary to prevent the establishment of duplicate schools too near each other. But in a country so small as ours, with means of locomotion so abundant, it would not be difficult to find access for scholars to rich and privileged centres of education, even though those centres had not been originally adapted to the local requirements. Therefore the first inquiry of the commissioners is, "How far can this endowment be wisely used on the spot?" And unless it can be fairly proved that this was impossible, the extreme powers given to them for removing endowments from one place to another are not likely to be much exercised. But although the grade system had been adopted it was very far from the intention of the commissioners to stereotype the education of the people into any fixed and unalterable forms. They had had quite enough experience of the mischief done by men who, with meagre imaginations and an imperfect power of forecasting the necessities of posterity, had nevertheless striven to formulate the exact schemes under which the education in the various schools should be con ducted for ever. The present Commission is intended to remedy that great evil, and if he knew anything of the spirit by which it is animated, its members are extremely anxious not to perpetuate and reproduce that evil by putting in its schemes any language which should bind posterity to a particular curriculum for all time. He hoped schools will exist of many different types, that even the first-grade schools will not be all alike, some devoting themselves to the purely literary department of university life, others to the scientific, others again paying special attention to modern languages. In like manner we may hope to get second and third grade schools of different types, and to frame schemes which will be elastic enough to allow of constant adaptation to the growing needs of the age and of future generations. Another point which he thought he ought to mention was that many of these endowments were expressly intended to give gratuitous education. He need not remind them how very strong all evidence and experience were in opposition to this system. What can be had for nothing is often valued at precisely ly what it costs; and in many schools where were free and pay scholars side by side, he had found that the free scholars learned very little, and that whatever was known, was known by |