238
EDUCATION IN RURAL SCHOOLS.
around them, and themselves to search for flowers, plants, insects, and other
objects, to illustrate the lessons which they have learnt with their teacher.
" The Board consider it, moreover, highly desirable that the natural
activities of children should be turned to useful account—that their eyes, for
example, should be trained to recognise plants and insects that are useful or
injurious (as the case may be) to the agriculturist, that their hands should be
trained to some of the practical dexterities of rural life, and not merely to the
use of pen and pencil, and that they should be taught, when circumstances
permit, how to handle the simpler tools that are used in the garden or on the
farm, before their school life is over.
" The Board are of opinion that one valuable means of evoking interest
in country life is to select for the object lessons of the lower Standards
subjects that have a connection with the daily surroundings of the children,
and that these lessons should lay the foundation of a somewhat more compre-
hensive teaching of a similar kind in the upper Standards.2 But these object
lessons must not be, as is too often the case, mere representations of descrip-
tions from text-books, nor a mechanical interchange of set questions and
answers between teacher and class. To be of any real use in stimulating the
intelligence, the object lessons should be the practising ground for observation
and inference, and they should be constantly illustrated by simple experiments
and practical work in which the children can take part, and which they can
repeat for themselves at home with their own hands. Specimens of such
Courses can be obtained on application to the Board of Education. These
may be varied indefinitely to suit the needs of particular districts. They are
meant to be typical and suggestive, and teachers, it is hoped, will frame others
at their discretion. Further, these lessons are enhanced in value if they are
connected with other subjects of study. The object lesson, for example, and
the drawing lesson, may often be associated together, and the children should
be taught to draw actual objects of graduated difficulty, and not merely to
work from copies. In this way they will gain a much more real knowledge of
common implements, fruits, leaves, and insects than if these had been merely
described by the teacher or read about in a lesson book. Composition
exercises may also be given—after the practical experiments and observations
have been made for the purpose of training the children to express in words
both what they have seen and the inferences which they draw from what they
have seen ; and the children should be frequently required and helped to
describe in their exercise books sights of familiar occurrence in the woods and
in the fields. Problems in arithmetic connected with rural life may also be
frequently set with advantage.
" The Board of Education also attach considerable importance to work
being clone by the elder scholars outside the school walls, whether such work
takes the form of elementary mensuration, of making sketch-plans of the
playground and the district surrounding the school, of drawing common
objects of paying visits of observation to woods, lanes, ponds, farms, and
other suitable places under the guidance of the teacher, or of the cultivation
of a school garden.
" The teacher should, as occasion offers, take the children out of doors
for school walks at the various seasons of the year, and give simple lessons on
2 The important points to be observed in ail object teaching were set out in the Official
Circular (No. 369) issued on this subject on June 25th, 1895, copies of which may be obtained
from the Board of Education.