Reports of the Irish Commissioners on the National Agricultural Schools of Ireland for 1855, where so admirably useful and popular have farm schools proved, that they have increased from 92 in the year 1852, to 165 in 1855. I have just been favoured with the following letter from Dr. Kirkpatrick, Chief Inspector of those schools : "Albert National Agricultural Training Institution, 66 SIR "I am persuaded that there can be no more appropriate exercise for school boys than light farm or garden labour; which, instead of retarding, promotes the acquisition of ordinary school and other useful knowledge; and in corroboration of this statement, which is indeed founded upon personal observation, I beg to direct your attention to the accompanying letters from Messrs. Donaghy, Brogan, Mc. Donnell, and Healy, all of whom were for several years engaged, and very successfully too, in carrying out this combined system of literary and industrial instruction in the National Agricultural Schools in this country. Had time permitted (I am just setting out on a tour of inspection), I could have collected a large mass of testimony on this very important subject, which, in my opinion, has not hitherto received that attention and patronage which it merits. "I requested that the secretaries would forward to you a copy of my last Report on National Agricultural Schools, and I marked several passages which had a prominent bearing on the subject of your note. I trust you have received the volume, and that you have noted the opinions expressed by persons so well qualified to do so as Lord Monteagle, the Rev. Messrs. Brady, Ward, Payne, Callan, &c. "I have the honour to be, Sir, "Your obedient Servant, "THOMAS KIRKPATRICK, M.D. "Inspector of National Agricultural Schools, Ireland. "P.S.-Allow me to call your attention to my Evidence before the 'Select Committee of the House of Lords on the Practical Working of the System of National Education in Ireland,' August, 1854. “To J. C. Symons, Esq. H. M. Inspector of Schools, &c. &c.” If industrial schools in England were so managed that the parents should benefit by the proceeds of their children's labour, I am confident that every objection on their parts would vanish, as I found the case with the parents of the children at Hagley by personal inquiry of themselves. And not only have the children from that school distinguished themselves in the recent competition for prizes awarded only to attainments, but the utility and merits of that industrial school are so well appreciated by the parents, that the average duration of attendance there greatly exceeds the usual amount in most other schools. And this brings me to the practical bearing of this question. The moment we can convince the parents of the working class that the time their children spend at school-though it does not pretend to make them skilled labourers-has a practical effect in preparing them for labour-life, and is, by furthering their aptitude for it, enhancing its future gains-from that moment education assumes a new value in their eyes. It presents itself in a totally different aspect. It enlists the strongest aspirations of the labourer's heart in its favour, which mere scholastic education, such as it now is, arrays against it. If well chosen industrial training were annexed to each common school, and were it rigidly required that much of the instruction in school should have a practical and special bearing on the pursuits of industry and the needs of the labourer, such instruction being adapted to the character of each district, we should have but little longer to deplore the sparse attendance at our schools. In a word we should studiously adapt education to the class for whom we design it. This done we should have small reason to seek by other remedies, whether in half time systems, or prize schemes, to induce poor parents to fill common schools. The poor are shrewd judges of the value of what they buy, and they estimate schooling by the same test. Give it a money value and they will be ready customers. I am well aware that loftier motives ought to animate the people, but they do not; and we must condescend to adapt our tools to our materials. There is no compromise in doing this. We have a noble array of philanthropists in this country: but unfortunately they mostly walk on stilts. Their aims are above their objects: and they stride over the people instead of walking with them. The Prussian government has striven to amend this error in its schools. The three edicts of 1854 enforce the practical instead of the scientific and purely literary tenor of their former teaching. Stahl's canon prevails-"Die wissenschaft muss umkehren." I would that we so far followed their example as to enforce sound instruction of a useful kind among all classes of scholars, in each of our common schools. If this were but done, how much formidable prejudice and obstructive apathy would disappear before the simple process of "setting our house in order!" Like most of the enmities and evils which mankind wastes so much of its energy in combating, the fons et origo are, like the remedy, within ourselves. Great and cheering has been the progress of education and especially of the general interest in its furtherance, and it is nowise a matter for wonder or despondency that so swift an advance from the stagnation of the past to the activity of the present should be attended by the mistakes incidental to our very zeal in the cause. But we must look our defects fairly in the face. We are applying our stimulants to a kind of instruction suited only to the forward intellects of hundreds, instead of adapting knowledge to the wants of the millions. Our schools are not what the people need; and that is why the people slight our schools. The remedy is to make them with all speed what Colman justly calls "one of the most valuable institutions of a community,"- -SCHOOLS WHICH TRAIN MINDS AND BODIES, NOT FOR LITERARY LEISURE, BUT FOR THE ACTIVE AND BUSINESS PURSUITS OF LIFE. DERIVATION AS AN ADJUNCT TO UNDERSTANDING “ Τὰ ρήματα & ἐγὼ λαλῶ ὑμῖν τνευμά ἐστι καὶ ζωή ἐστιν.” “Ἐὰν δυν μὴ ἐιδῶ τὴν δύναμιν τῆς φωνῆς, ἔσομαι τῷ λαλουντι βάρβαρος. καὶ ὁ λαλῶν, ἐν ἐμοὶ βάρβαρος.” Without considering reason and reflection to be the handmaidens, much less, as some have maintained, the actual offspring of language,-without wishing to claim for it in its relations with mind any higher than purely ministerial functions, I have nevertheless frequently been forcibly struck with the depth of our Saviour's observation-"The words which I speak unto you are spirit and are life." The extent and accuracy of our knowledge certainly has a most intimate connexion with words. Teachers, above all men, have reason to wish earnestly that their words possessed life and spirit: that their language could be the embodiment, the materiality of thought: and that their speech could be so framed as to convey spirited and life like impressions to their hearers. Too frequently it is to be feared that their words partake largely of the character described by St. Paul, when he says "If I know not the power of the voice, I shall be to him who speaketh a barbarian and he who speaketh a barbarian to me." Deeply impressed with the conviction that ignorance of words, and therefore ignorance of thoughts and things, is extensively prevalent among the classes with whom the elementary teacher is officially connected, the consideration of one of the means by which the words of our language may become more generally understood may not perhaps be unprofitable. There can be little need theoretically to impress upon teachers that words ought to convey to the mind, by the instrumentality of the eye and ear, ideas and perceptions as clear and well defined as the images reflected by the looking glass, and that they ought as faithfully to reflect the thoughts of man to his fellows. It will be equally unnecessary to offer to them lengthened remarks upon the use, growth, and constitution of the English language. They will remember that, based originally upon the Celtic, subsequently well nigh supplanted by the Anglo-Saxon, afterwards greatly extended by the Latin additions introduced principally through themedium of Norman-French, and lastly considerably amplified by the incorporation of Greek derivatives, scarcely any language is so largely a mixture of others as our own. Of the many sources however from which it is derived, it is a well established fact that the poorer classes among us are well acquainted only with one. While the English language may be said for most practical every day purposes to consist entirely of two great elements, viz. Saxon, or Scandinavian, and Latin, or Classical, and while both these elements are well understood and extensively used by the middle, upper, and so called educated classes, the Saxon alone is generally comprehended and used by the lower orders. Books, newspapers, lectures, and other media of instruction are the productions of educated men who express their thoughts and therefore write largely in words derived from the Latin source. The large interspersion of Latin derivatives in works of an elevating, humanising, and instructive tendency, renders them to a large extent unintelligible to the more purely Saxon speaking classes, who, of all classes, have most need of them. Mr. Tufnell's anecdote describing the impossibility experienced by a clergyman in Kent of making his poorer parishioners understand a common newspaper paragraph, will sufficiently illustrate this. An almost insuperable bar is presented to the improvement of the uneducated masses in consequence of their general ignorance of the classical derivatives. Such words, moreover, are frequently the key stones in sentences, which thence possess neither light nor spirit for them, and the best works in the language, taken as a whole, are consequently not simply inappreciable, but absolutely non-understandable by them. This is a great evil, an acknowledged fact. Can it be neither remedied nor altered? Is the language of our statesmen and our poets to remain a voice without power to the millions? Are the discourses of our clergy to remain above the comprehension of the bulk of their hearers? Practical educationists must deliberately pronounce the evil remediable, however much they may differ as to the mode of cure. The subject appears susceptible of a threefold resolution :- Firstly-That books of instruction, &c. should be written and lectures delivered in a homely style, and mainly in Saxon derivatives, for the special use of the lower classes. Secondly-That the educated classes should descend entirely to the level of the lower classes. Thirdly-That the lower classes should be raised towards the level of the highest. The first plan it is clear would be at best but a very imperfect amelioration, since it provides for no intercourse with the ideas of men, and no knowledge of things, except when expressed in a particular way, and that way an unusual one. It makes no provision for conversational intercourse, and has in itself a highly objectionable tendency to perpetuate mental caste. The second scheme would require the upper and educated classes voluntarily to expunge from the language all derivations not generally understood, whether written or spoken, and to confine themselves principally to the element understood by their poorer neighbours. Independently of the improbability that the rich and educated as a class will ever adopt it, such a change is no more to be desired by the patriot or philanthropist than the communist position that all men should be equally poor in pocket deserves to be wished for by the politician. The one proposition is an exact analogue of the other. Such a change would immediately place the nation at large in a state of insolvency when compared with other countries in word wealth. The difficulty, if not the impossibility of adequately rendering a newspaper article or a chapter from an ordinary book into pure Saxon terms; the loss of force and the paraphrases which would be entailed upon us by such a restriction upon the circulating medium of thought may perhaps be partially realized, by attempting a few such phrases as the following: He was distinguished for his quick perception, accurate observation, great reflection and natural discernment. The absence of organic constituents is one of the peculiar characteristics of artificial compounds. The defect on the part of the Anglo-Saxon adequately to express the idea conveyed by many Latin derivatives is not to be wondered at. Words are the symbols of objects, thoughts, and feelings. We have no Latin or Greek word that exactly expresses the notion conveyed by our terms alkali, railway, pistol, battery, organ, (musical instrument) because the things they represent were unknown to the Latins and Greeks. Similarly many notions, thoughts, and feelings common to them as a comparatively polished, civilized, and thinking people were unknown or but imperfectly realized by the comparatively unpolished, uncivilized and unintellectual Saxons. Whence we might anticipate that, while Saxon words exist in abundance to express things, feelings, and thoughts common to men living in a low state of civilization and knowledge, they would fail to express those which exist only a more advanced state of cultivation and progress. The third method is to impart to the poorer classes such a knowledge of the Latin (classic element) as will enable them to understand the ordinary language, whether written or spoken of the upper classes, to raise their state of intelligence to an approximatory level to that of their wealthier neighbours, and this appears to be the only method deserving consideration. An acquaintance with the primary meaning of those classical roots which enter largely into the composition of English words, and which are easily traceable in their derivatives, coupled with an intelligent knowledge of the modifications caused in the original meaning of the roots by the addition of a few prefixes and postfixes appears to be both practicable and calculated largely to promote an extended knowledge of the language employed. Roots may be considered from a twofold point of view. The first division may be based upon the ease or difficulty with which a root may be identified in its derivations, and may be subdivided into 1. Those immediately recognizable. 2. Less easily recognizable. 3. Those whose original form or signification is scarcely perceptible in existing derivatives. The second division may be based upon the extent to which derivatives exist in the language, and may be divided into 1. Those largely incorporated. 2. Those seldom occurring. Roots comprised within the first classes of both divisions appear to offer the highest advantages, since the knowledge of comparatively few such roots, together with common prefixes and postfixes, and some exercise on their combinations, renders a vast number of words comprehensible, all of which would otherwise require separate and individual explanation. Roots comprised within the first class of either division, while less extensively useful, might nevertheless be profitably studied. Other roots would certainly be less useful. Instead of being taught as a separate and independent subject, they might be explained incidentally when they occurred. The more useful ones might be taught systematically. Prefixes and postfixes being first committed to memory, a few roots (six to twelve), according to circumstances, may be learnt by heart daily. When satisfied that they are thoroughly known, encourage the children to give words formed from them by the addition of postfixes and prefixes, and to explain the modi |