BRITISH TEACHERS' ASSOCIATION.

ADDRESS OF CONDOLENCE TO THE QUEEN.

THE following address of condolence to Her Majesty was resolved on at the February meeting of this Association, and has since been graciously received.

To the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty.

We, the members of the British Teachers' Association, and Masters of British Schools in the Metropolis and its neighbourhood, desire to offer to your Majesty the expression of our heartfelt sorrow and condolence on occasion of the very heavy loss which has been recently sustained by your Majesty and the Royal Family.

In common with the rest of your subjects, we have long regarded with interest and admiration the career of His Royal Highness the Prince Consort, and have honoured him for his high character and for his blameless and useful life. We have felt grateful to God, for granting to your Majesty so wise a counsellor, and so faithful a friend. But, as teachers, we have had special occasion to rejoice at the manner in which his great influence and talents were ever directed to the social and intellectual improvement of the people; at his zeal for public education, and at the judicious patronage which he extended to every beautiful and humanizing art. Many of us have taken advantage of the facilities which he created for instruction in drawing and design, and have found them of great service in our professional duties. All of us lament his premature death as a national misfortune, and grieve to think of the many noble and benevolent enterprises which are now deprived for ever of his guidance and his powerful aid.

We earnestly trust that all the consolations which a Heavenly Father can give to those whom He has afflicted may be granted to your Majesty, and that the Divine tenderness and love may be specially manifested to yourself and your royal children, during the season of retirement and sorrow. We pray that your Majesty may soon be restored to your wonted health and comfort, and may long live to find a solace in the affectionate loyalty and sympathy of a prosperous, a united, and a religious people.

The next meeting of the Association will be held in May, when Mr. R. Bithell, of Kingsland, will read a paper on the prospects of teachers in connexion with the Department of Science and Art.

THE INTERNATIONAL EXHIBITION-EDUCATIONAL

DEPARTMENT.

We understand that the department appropriated to education in the forthcoming Exhibition is situated in the central tower of the building, above the principal entrance in the Cromwell-road, and that it is approached by a staircase situated between the English and the Foreign portions of the great Picture Gallery. The apartment in the central tower is to be partly occupied by photographs and partly by the educational collection. We regret to learn that the total space allotted to education is much smaller than was at first expected, and that the collection will probably lack both the unity and the comprehensiveness which the committee of advice desired to give it. It is a curious fact that while the dimensions of the room allow less than 2000 square feet of area available for exhibition, the application for space amounted to nearly 30,000. It, however, was found necessary to exclude many entire classes of objects which would have been most interesting to teachers, and to suffer many important branches of educational manufacture to be very imperfectly represented. It is believed, however, that a very large number of beautiful and novel articles will be exhibited in the Educational Court. Each of the principal Educational Societies-the National, the British and Foreign, the Home and Colonial, the Christian Knowledge, the Religious Tract, the Book-Hawking Union, the Congregational Board, and the Reformatory and Refuge Union--has received an allotment of space;

books employed in schools will also be exhibited, and, as we are informed, under certain restrictions, to be accessible to visitors who desire to consult thei to make notes of their contents. A specimen of the newest philosophical adapted to educational purposes, of Natural History and Geological Coll Globes and of Drawing Materials, will be found classified in the various bays round the room; and the walls are expected to be covered with the most re diagrams, and tabular lessons. The centre of the apartment is to be oc toys; as the Commissioners, having regard, we suppose, to the fact that an important part in infant training, and are often constructed with a disti tional purpose, determined to classify them as "Educational W Appliances."

It will be remembered that in the Exhibition of 1851 there was no speci ment appropriated to Education. We are glad to find that the Commiss the forthcoming Exhibition recognize the importance of the subject; & allotted to it a space, which, though far from adequate, is yet as large as spared in such a building. We trust that the success of the experimen sufficient to justify its repetition on a larger and more comprehensive scale future time.

MARTIN, P. W., Esq., M.P., 7, Cornwall-terrace, Regent's-park, N.W.

RICHARDS, W., Esq., 10, City Chambers, E.C.

ROTHSCHILD, Baron L de, New Court, E.C.

SHEPPARD, T., Esq., 88, High-street, Borough, S.E.....

STEPHENSON, Mrs. M., per Overend, Gurney, and Co...

WILLSON, W. T., Esq., Tooley-street, S.E.

WOOD, J. P., Esq., High-street, Borough, S.E. "X. X."

Don.

£ s. d.

050

10 10 0

500

Subscriptions and Donations will be thankfully received by Messrs. HANBURYS and Co., Ba to the Society, 60, Lombard-street; and at the Society's House, Borough-road.

GEORGE UNWIN, GRESHAM STEAM PRESS, BUCKLERSBURY, LONDON, E.C.

THE

EDUCATIONAL RECORD.

BRITISH AND FOREIGN SCHOOL SOCIETY.

ANNUAL MEETING.

THE Anniversary of the Society took place on Monday, the 12th of May, under the presidency of the Right Hon. the Earl Russell, K.G. The company assembled at ten o'clock in the large room of the Practising School, to witness the examination of the Boys. At twelve o'clock, the subscribers and friends of the Society adjourned to the Girls' School to receive the Report of the Society, and to elect the Committee for the ensuing year. At the call of the Chairman,

Mr. E. D. J. Wilks, the Secretary, read the Annual Report, of which the following is a summary :

The Society's operations include the training of teachers, the maintenance of the Model Schools for Boys and Girls in the Borough-road and at Stockwell, the inspection of schools in London and the country, as well as an extensive corre spondence abroad. Aid is also rendered, by grants of school materials, to poor schools at home and in the colonies. In the training department, provision is made for 200 young people; the establishment for young men being at the Borough-road, and for young women at Stockwell. Of the former there are at present 195, of the latter, 100, in course of preparation for elementary schools. At the Christmas examination for certificates, seventy-two young men were presented, the whole of whom passed; of seventy-three young women presented, sixty-nine were

successful.

Seven inspectors are employed, covering the whole of the country, and engaged in the inspection of schools, holding conferences with committees, meetings of parents, and otherwise stimulating to action in the cause of popular education. The number of towns and villages thus visited is 861; the number of schools inspected 1,157, including 1,347 visits to these schools. This is exclusive of the

etropolis and its immediate vicinity, where Mr. Saunders has visited schools atended by more than 30,000 children. At the Model Schools, in the Borough-road, Or Boys and Girls, there is an average attendance of nearly 1,000 children, and at he Practising Schools at Stockwell, for Girls and Infants, of 250. Of eighty-two

grants of school materials made during the year, twenty have been made to new schools, thirty-nine to poor schools in the country and to ragged schools, and twenty-three to the colonies and other parts of the world.

The contemplated alterations at the Borough-road, and the various buildings and appliances at the New Training College at Stockwell, are completed, at a cost, including fittings, furniture, and other expenses, of £24,174 9s. 5d., the whole of which has been paid. Towards this amount, the contribution received from the Committee of Council was £5,742 128. After acknowledging the generous aid given by the friends of the Society, to enable the Committee to accomplish this important undertaking, the Report concluded with an earnest appeal for pecuniary assistance in carrying forward the several and important objects of the Society.

The Rev. H. ALLON:

I am to move, my Lord, that the Report, an abstract of which has been read, be printed and circulated under the direction of the Committee, and that the following gentlemen form the Committee for the ensuing year. (The names were read.)

We are contented, in the British and Foreign School Society, to stand as one of the many educational institutions of the country; that is our peculiar and distinctive position. We do not, on the one hand, claim a monopoly of public help that is rendered to education; nor do we, on the other hand, repudiate all help, either for ourselves or for anybody else. I think we have the advantage, in this respect, of those who rely on purely voluntary effort. I heartily and cordially rejoice in all that they are doing for the promotion of public education. I heartily rejoice in what they are doing in the educational agencies of this country. But the one impracticable thing about them is, that they will not permit us to be right as well as themselves; they claim a monopoly of rights; they maintain that they are the men, and that wisdom must die with them; that they only have got hold of the right educational principle, and that we are wrong altogether. Well, if this were a simple matter of morals, of course it would be capable of being resolved into such a simple alternative as this; but in matters of expediency there are a great many rights, there are a great many ways of doing things according to different circumstances. I think we do things in one way; the Institution at Homerton does its work in another way; the National Society in another way; the Wesleyan Insti tution in another way; but, altogether, I hope we are helping and greatly helping the progress of education in this country. I think we may congratulate ourselves on the manner in which the British and Foreign School Society presents itself to the public on this, its fifty-seventh anniversary. One is gratified when one looks round, from year to year, and notices the manifest progress which the education of the country is making. Looking at the moral results and different agencies which are in operation, I think we must rejoice in the manifest progress made from year to year. It is very difficult to discriminate causes from effects. Perhaps, in the general progress of the country, all things are causes and effects by turns; but yet we see in our improved legislation a general progress of the country, an amelioration of our laws, and the increased intelligence of our law-makers, and also in the cha racter and tone of our literature, in the almost total disappearance of a certain class of literature which was a disgrace to any civilized community a few years ago. We see, I think, a manifest advance in public morality, both in the higher classes of society and in the lower, perhaps in nothing more signally than in the deportment of the English people at the present moment. I know nothing which more marks the growing intelligence and effective education of this country than the deportment of our Lancashire and Yorkshire fellow-countrymen at this trying season. I do not think that any other cause would have been adequate to produce this result. There has been a spread, not only of mere intellectual knowledge, but of religious knowledge, and a growth of religious feeling throughout the various educational

institutions of the country, which has led to this very remarkable position of our suffering operatives. We have only to contrast the behaviour of the workmen in Paris, in seasons of any great distress, with the proud, self-help of our poor suffering fellow-countrymen in the north of England. The Sunday schools of the country are very effectively during their work, and the progress of secular education has a very important bearing upon the work of our Sunday schools. I remember the time when, in many Sunday schools, secular education was imparted. I know some one or two schools which still retain this necessary element of the past-reading, writing, and arithmetic are taught on the Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon. They were taught at first for this obvious reason, that there was not an adequate provision for their being taught through the days of the week; but now, except in Stockport, and perhaps in Macclesfield, those two large Sunday schools where the practice is retained, I know of no other schools in the kingdom where the religious teaching of the Sabbath is interfered with by the impartation of the secular elements of education, which desirable end has been attained by the progress of education through the British and Foreign School Society, and other kindred institutions. We are also gratified in seeing the healthy reaction from the somewhat superfine education we were in danger of having imparted in our schools a year or two ago. I think the revolt of the practical good sense of the English people from the teaching of things that might simply adorn a life, but would not contribute to its practical usefulness, has been a very characteristic and a very gratifying thing. I have been very glad to see, on the part of parents, on the part of the school examiners, and on the part of the supporters of schools, a strong stern demand for the things which are practically useful. It may be a very unphilosophical thing for us to care so little about outside appearances, and outside glory, but we do care about that which will make our homes healthy and happy, and contribute to the practical efficiency of the English people. One or two principles, I think, have been established, and may be regarded now as accepted things; one is, that, in education, the religious element is and must be inseparable from the secular. I do not think that any education can be efficient, by any possibility, that has not the religious element intermixed with it-interfused through it. I do not know any heresy so perilous as to produce the impression, in the mind of the child, that religion is a thing apart, that religion can be separated from any question or any pursuit of life. I do not know anything that is so calculated to lead children to regard religion as a thing of Sundays and special services, as this. I am glad, therefore, that public opinion in this has prevailed, and that it has come to be an accepted fact, that no mere secular educational scheme can be successful in this country. It is a very serious matter to make the Bible a tabooed thing at any hour, or under any circumstance, or to make direct religious instruction, at any time, or in any place, an illicit thing. The true idea of religion is, that it is to pervade everything the child does, and everything that the child learns. And then, I think, another principle has been established pretty generally in England, and that is, that our schools are to be substantially self-managed schools. I do not know that there is much dispute about that. I do not suppose that any one of us would be willing to accept any help from the Committee of Council, or from any other source that vitally interfered with the selfgovernment of our schools. I do not know that I have anything that I should say more, excepting this one thing, that people are continually coming to our schools, and availing themselves of the eleemosynary education that is afforded, who are perfectly competent to educate themselves. This is an evil which, I think, affects all public schools alike—the British and Foreign School Society, the National Society, and other Societies. It is a question which deserves the very serious consideration of all who manage schools, how to devise means to exclude from schools children whose parents are as competent to pay for their education as we are for our own. In my own schools at this time, I believe there are scores of children whose parents