teaching is not for a foreigner to decide lightly. One cannot help thinking that they might at least have first tried the system of allowing the priest access to the schools during certain hours. The writing appeared to me unusually good. The teaching of arithmetic is excellent. The method employed throughout is that of making the child explain at the side every step he takes. The inspectors are dead against what I would call the cookery book system of working out an example on the board by way of recipe and the setting the children down to do others like it. Again, all sums have to be concrete; either about the number of cows in a yard, or the cost of a pound of butter, &c. There is no juggling with abstract figures. But the chief advantage of all is that the pupil works with the metric system. Thanks to the latter every pupil obtains a definite notion of superficies and volume, which our unfortunate children can never get from our kaleidoscopic weights and measures, in which gills are metamorphosed into pints, pints into quarts, quarts into gallons, at which point a new bifurcation comes on for wet and dry measure. The result is that the English child never realises that there is any such thing as a scientific unit of dimension, but vaguely imagines that measures are a mere affair of pots for wet things and pans for dry. Composition is better taught in the French rural school than with us, as more stress is laid on making the essay a whole in itself. Still it has suffered in the past, and still suffers from excessive attention being paid to minutiæ in spelling in spite of the recent reforms. Geography begins with elementary notions of the world, and of the meaning of a map. It then comes back to the starting point in English and German schools, the schoolhouse and its environment. An excellent practice obtains in some schools of hanging up maps made by the teachers of the department or commune either geographical or agronomic. History is too much of the blood and thunder type which breeds young fire-eaters, though the social and economic side is being gradually developed. Manual training is practically a dead letter in the country. In one village I went into it had been suddenly dropped. The local authorities who were delighted by the great progress shown by the children at their home-work, discovered that the village carpenter was making a handsome thing out of doing their work for them. Military exercises have caught on, but little in the country; singing in the departments I visited was much neglected. In domestic economy the French

have nothing to teach us. They have not yet determined its place in the curriculum. The sewing is probably their strongest point. I only saw one cookery lesson, and that was given out of a book. The teacher described the roasting of a fowl to the class. A series of questions that followed showed the children had only retained half the directions. It is to be hoped for the peace of the future households over which they will have to preside that they have already forgotten the other half.

And now we come to the subject which, perhaps, is of most interest to us here in England to-day, the so-called teaching of agriculture. Before, however, discussing the French solution, it should be remembered that the rural problem in France and that in England differ in certain radical particulars. Hence, what may suit France need not necessarily suit England, and vice-versa. To begin with, it must be remembered that the rural population in France outnumbers the urban, whereas in England it is just the other way. Accordingly country interests in France have had a greater chance of making their wants heard and attended to than with us. The French rural problem has therefore been tackled at least ten years earlier. Again England is rather a country of large farms, France of small holdings. In England the bulk of the village community are landless men, save the squire, parson and farmers, whose children do not frequent the village school. In France, in some communes, one person in every four is a proprietor, and there-fore the pick of the village scholars are the sons of peasants who have been helping their fathers on their small holdings from their earliest years.

Hence while the problem in England seems to be to stimulate observation. and dexterity, to provide at most an eye and hand training in order to improve the future labourer's efficiency, in France, rightly or wrongly, the aim has been to give the pupil some grasp of the principles underlying the science of agriculture.

The first attempt to develop popular agricultural teaching in the primary school goes back to 1866, but nothing was really done till the law of 1879, which started agricultural teaching in the normal schools and made it compulsory after three years in the elementary schools, each departmental education committee being left to draw up its own agricultural programme.

Unfortunately this local option in programme making seems to have produced more harm

than good, for the reason that the aim and first principles of the subject had not been thought out. A visitor to France in 1891 found no less than six conceptions of agricultural teaching in existence. The first consisted of stray notions on the subject being given by the teacher, often out of a book, supplemented by passages for dictation culled out of the agricultural journals. The basis of the second was the lecturing by heart of little agricultural catechisms, in which the horse was defined as a four-legged animal, and the obvious and the abstruse were delightfully jumbled together. The others were variations of the gardening method, the fullest being that in which each child had a plot, and cultivated another in partnership with his fellows, under the eye of the teacher. In 1895 the Ministry took the matter in hand, and order was evolved out of chaos by the celebrated scheme of January, 1897, "On the teaching of elementary notions of agriculture in rural schools." The method was to be notions of science applied to agriculture, and the procedure was to be above all practical. The aim was to inspire children with a love of the country life, and convince them of the superiority of an agricultural occupation for those who practise it with industry, intelligence, and enlightenment. Teachers were advised to give the whole curriculum an agricultural tinge, and to make their lessons in agricultural teaching coincide with the seasons. Inflated programmes were deprecated, and suggestions for a course offered. In the elementary grade only simple objects should be given, For the middle grade there should be more object lessons, together with reading lessons and school walks. Simple experiments in the three states of matter, the study of useful and noxious plants, of combustion, of composition of soils, &c., should be included, as well as experiments with different manures, including the fivefold experiment with the different chemicals necessary for the support of plant life, potash, superphosphate, and nitrate. The need of champs d'expérience or trial fields is also insisted on. An inspection of the present departmental programme reveals that they are all maxima programmes. In fact the teacher is not so much supposed to follow them implicitly, but rather to pick and choose those portions which best suit his own district, be it a grazing or arable country, a wine or a cider district. Another point which an inspection of the programmes brings out is, that though the

1

majority of them are far more practicable than the old programmes, there is still doubt whether the scientific and general side, or the agricultural side, should predominate.

These programmes are meant for boys, but girls are also taught horticulture, a matter the French peasant largely leaves to his womankind. They are also given some instruction in poultry keeping and dairy work.

As regards text-books their employment is well defined in the Calvados programme. "Books will be useless in the cours élémentaire préparatoire; optional in the cours moyen; indispensable in the cours supérieur." The work placed in the hands of the pupils will only serve for reference. In no case will it take the place of oral teaching. Of those who would do entirely without books, one is compelled to ask what is the use then of libraries? Pictures, diagrams, and the musée scolaire are all useful adjuncts to the teaching of the subject.

The

But, as the Ministry have recognised, the chief value of the subject lies on its experimental and practical side. The experiment in pots is pretty, but insufficient; more fruitful have been the outdoor experiments in the teachers' gardens, or in the champs d'expérience. In two directions the school has been able to render valuable service to the cause of agriculture. One is the teaching of grafting in the vine districts, where the reconstruction of the vineyards is of capital importance, owing to the devastation of the phylloxera; and the other is the wider and more intelligent use of natural and especially artificial manures. employment of the latter is especially needful in a country where the head of stock kept by the peasant is comparatively small. The agricultural education of the department outside the primary school is one of the many functions that concern the professor of agriculture, but, in looking after the “ trial fields," the teachers often prove to be his most valuable heuchman. In some departments these champs d'expérience are quite insufficient. In Calvados, for example, there are only some 20 or 30 in 763 communes. In Sarthe, on the other hand, with 386 communes, they numbered 167 in 1898-9, of which some 80 were looked after by the teachers. A further aid to the outside work of the school is the school journey, during which the children take notes, and occasionally botanise.

To sum up, while the older teachers seem generally indifferent, there are many among the younger generation who, thanks to the

teaching in the normal schools, take a keen interest in the subject. The chief desideratum seems to be the establishment everywhere of a small garden. This is so strongly felt by the Ministry that at the Exhibition of 1900 there was a small model garden which, though it occupied only some 75 square yards, allowed room for a largish number of experiments. Most of the plants it contained came originally from school gardens. The botanical bed in the middle was composed of field flowers. It sufficed, as the official report says, for the study of the principal families, and was none the worse for being ornamental. In the foreground was a narrow bed containing the principal leguminous and gramineous plants that every cultivator ought to know. To the left, five little squares were sown with mixtures of these plants in order to form specimen meadow plots. Behind them were four quadrangular plots sown with maize, potatoes, tomatoes, &c., each being treated either with no manure, or with different dressings to show the effect of proper manuring. Against the wall at the side were climbing plants, vines, and fruit trees. In spite of the torrid heat and the attentions of the Paris sparrows, the garden looked very well, and the experiments were most satisfactory. Some English critics, no doubt, will not be able to completely approve of the French solution, though experiments on more or less similar lines have been carried out with much success in this country, notably by the Surrey County Council, in Norfolk, and the Isle of Wight.

It is possible that the advocates of Nature study would insist on the superior educational value of an education whose first principles are rather based on training the observation and the imagination. The French system bears on the face of it a practical and utilitarian aim. Yet any judgment passed upon it must take into consideration the requirements of the French rural problem.

To encourage the teaching of the subject in the rural schools, examinations written and oral are held, and prizes awarded by the different departments. The examination papers include questions framed on the missing word principle, questions demanding an answer of two or three lines, agricultural book-keeping, which is really a short problem in arithmetic, an essay, and a simple design from memory. In Sarthe, there are not only school examinations but school exhibitions, which are apparently very successful. Prizes are given

by the local agricultural societies - a point that might well be copied in England.

The French programme, as the examination paper just quoted shows, attempts as far as possible to dove-tail the subjects into one another. As was indicated at the outset, a subject is not so much squeezed into the curriculum because it "pays or because it is a fad. To gain entry it has to prove that it will better the all-round efficiency of the pupil. None the less there is a general feeling that the curriculum is overloaded, which is plain, when, as we have seen the school working-week is 30 hours, and the number of hours required by the subject is 34. French teachers are already asking whether the wisest thing would not be to have the main programme the same for town and country with certain optional subjects for urban or rural children. The teachers themselves favour some such form of decentralisation, and probably some sort of restricted local option will be possible in the near future.

As a sanction to all these studies, the French have created a merit or leaving certificate called the certificat d'études. It has its drawbacks, the principal one being the premature age at which the pupils take it, with the result that it leads to cramming. Yet on the other hand it is held in high esteem by parents and by the business world. It also gives the State a valuable means of audit, all the more valuable because part of it is oral. Happily, in France, the fetish of paper-work has not reached the dimensions it has with us. The French have all along seen that viva voce is an indispensable supplement to a written examination, because it tests qualities which are of real worth in daily life, presence of mind, power to mobilise one's knowledge and intelligence at a minute's notice, and to think out a problem quickly. Paper work is a good test for the closet student, the recluse, but oral examination brings out as no other test the strong points of the business man who has got to keep his head and to come to a sound decision-more speedily than his fellow competitors. In any case, the advantages of the examination appear even in the teacher's eyes to outweigh the disadvantages. For those who would learn more of its working I must refer to an excellent monograph on the subject by Sir Joshua Fitch. If such an examination were adopted in England it would probably be best to entrust it to a board, consisting of the inspectors, with representatives from primary, secondary, and technical schools and com

mittees. Were the examination conducted by districts in the counties and by group centres in the large boroughs, the whole examination could be got through generally in a single day, provided the examining board were big enough.

Most of the foregoing remarks refer to the State lay schools, as the religious schools in the country are comparatively few. Their strength lies strangely enough in the towns where they can charge fees. In teaching methods they are and have been generally inferior, but this is scarcely surprising when one realises that they are entirely self-supporting. The intolerable strain with them is not some 20 per cent. of the maintenance, but 100 per cent. Under these circumstances one can only admire the spirit of self-devotion that keeps them alive. Many will probably go under owing to the financial strain, quite apart from any alterations that may be made in the new law on the right to teach.

The agricultural training given in the normal schools is naturally of vital importance to the rural school. While it appears to be sound upon its normal side, it probably still requires a good deal of attention to make its practical side as effective as it might be. The truth is in many cases the agricultural professors are so hard-worked they have not the time to pay the requisite attention to their out-door courses at the normal colleges, and, on the other hand, there is not always that close correlation that ought to exist between the teaching of the agricultural professor and his confrère the professor of science. Agricultural teaching in the training colleges for women largely consists of horticulture.

The chief lesson to be learnt from the French training colleges is that we must copy them in immensely increasing our facilities for training, while we must avoid their mistake of setting up a brace of normal schools for each county or department. What our authorities should rather do is to group their schools round the universities or existing training colleges, or perhaps in the case of some of the rural counties build small hostels round some of the agricultural colleges, which the students could attend for certain courses; while in other respects they would receive a literary training. In any case, we want on the one hand to centralise the training centres, and on the other to encourage the counties to go shares as much as possible in the building of new schools, or at least, to place their hostels alongside one another round a nucleus of class

rooms and school buildings to be used in

common.

The opportunities for agricultural education in secondary French schools are so insignificant they need not be mentioned. The local grammar schools are far more out of touch with the localities than with us. Far more promising is the creation of ex-standard classes and higher primary schools in the country districts with a view to catering for rural needs. This is a species of school which it ought to be easy for the rural counties in England to erect in the near future. Only the authorities must steadily bear in mind what sort of pupil they mean to produce, and to be certain to produce one who will not be a déclassé. But the rural problem in France is complicated as in England by class distinctions. Parents will still go on sending their boys to the religious high school or the college because it is the fashion. The remedy in both countries, therefore, seems to be to modernise the college course and make it give, as the great majority of country grammar schools should give, a thoroughly modern education. The scholarship system properly arranged should provide for moving on a clever lad to some central county school which prepared for the universities on classical lines. If a classical side exists in such schools, it should really be a side and not the main aim of the schools. These schools had a regular raison d'être to be classical schools in the days that the local upper ten frequented them. But with the revolution of transport, their clientèle has greatly changed, and the education they give should follow suit.

Of the extraordinary ardour with which the French teachers have thrown themselves into the extraneous work connected with the school, a few words must be said. Many of these works of superogation are performed by the English teacher, but nothing like to the same extent. One thing we might copy is the mutualité scolaire, or the system of old age pensions, which starts in the elementary school. Had the children's fees in English schools been devoted to this purpose instead of being abolished, we might have created with a stroke of the pen a complete system of old age pensions. Allusion has been already made to the evening classes and lectures carried on by teachers in connection or not with old boys' clubs. Some idea of the magnitude of the work may be gathered from the fact that in 1900 the number of