more and more attention has been paid to the
qualifications of the teacher and to securing that he shall have
attained a certain standard of education, and have received a certain
measure of training before engaging upon the work of the instruction of
the young. We, _e.g._, no longer entrust the instruction of the younger
children in the school to the older, as was the custom under the
monitorial system of Bell and Lancaster, and with the abolition of the
pupil-teacher the last remnant of a system introduced at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, as the only remedy to meet the dire
educational necessities of the time, will have been removed.

But in spite of the great advances which have been made, there is a
deep-seated feeling now beginning to find expression, that somehow or
other the Elementary School has not realised all the expectations that
were once thought likely to result from the universal education of the
children of the nation, and that in particular the Primary School has
failed to foster and to establish the moral and social qualities
necessary for the welfare of a State whose government is founded on the
representative principle.

This, it seems to me, is largely due to the wrong conception of the aims
which the Primary School is intended to realise--a conception which
prevailed for many years after the introduction of compulsory elementary
education. For some time now, and especially during the past few years,
a counter-reaction has set in against the narrowness of the aims of the
preceding period, and like all reactions it tends to go to the opposite
extreme, and so to broaden the aims of the Primary School as to be in
danger of failing to realise efficiently any one of the ends which it
sets before it.

The state of things immediately preceding 1870 not unnaturally gave rise
to the idea that the acquisition of the arts of reading, writing, and
arithmetic was the one indispensable object to be attained in the
elementary education of the child. This conviction was strengthened by
the system of Government grants introduced into both English and Scotch
schools, payments to school managers being largely based upon the
successes obtained in passes in the three elementary subjects.

Certain results naturally followed. In the first place, no provision was
made for the special education of the infant classes. Since the
after-success of the child was measured by his attainments in the three
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