446
Composition including Handwriting, Spelling and Dictation.--Original com- position in English is offered for examination in the Upper School. The teaching of Colloquial, Handwriting, and Spelling in the Lower School forms a course of preparation for it.
In Class I, "The Stocks as a Punishment for Highway Robbery" was set as an Essay. It was expected that about one page of foolscap or 200 words would be written. In marking these papers our attention was principally confined to the language used, no marks being deducted for weakness of arrangement nor for lack of ideas so long as the matter was germane to the subject. At the conclusion of what represents an eight years' course of study of English we expected, not absolute correctness of idiom, but an absence of gross grammatical mistakes-much the same ,standard in fact as is attained in the composition of Latin in Public Schools. There too, the course has occupied about eight years; though as Public School boys have not the inestimable advantage of hearing Latin spoken daily, the test is very favourable to Queen's College. Under this test no paper containing more than 6 gross mistakes in 200 words could be passed. Out of 63 papers corrected, 19 passed with credit, 19 passed, 25 failed. Of the last, 11 or 18 per cent, of the total num- ber were very bad. Considering the Class as a whole some excellent work done at the top is counterbalanced by the performances of boys, who should apparently have hardly reached the Upper School at all, much less the top Class.
In support of this view we attach papers (see Appendix) selected quite at random from the first 19, and the last 11. The first 19 papers are divided almost equally between Divisions A and B, but the last 11 are all in Division B.
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Certain blunders are so common throughout the Upper School, that we feel it should be not impossible to trace them to a common source and then stop them. A notable example is the use and abuse of the word "shame" and its derivatives. It will hardly be believed that of 63 papers corrected in Class I, no less than 20 contained these and kindred mistakes "will never be ashame (this form alone recurred in 14 papers) "cause him much ashamed", "make ashame on the sufferer", &c., &c. Another very general mistake is failure to balance the tenses of verbs in a sentence correctly, especially in conditional sentences, where 'has' or 'had' is needed in the apodosis. "I will not dare to do what he had done". "If the Government do not punish the offenders, the people could not be safe."
In Class II the subject for composition was a letter, the recipient of which was to be informed that there was "some talk of increasing the time devoted to Chinese studies in the schools of the Colony," the writer giving his own views. (This was a very popular subject: some original views were developed. Incidentally it may be mentioned that a very large majority were in favour of the increase, the dissen- tients being non-Chinese with few exceptions.) On correcting the papers we found the greatest inequality in them and in order to come to some definite con- clusion on this point we shewed them to a lady who has had many years' experience as mistress of a school under the London School Board. She kindly classified them for us as follows:-
12 corresponded with Standard VII.
21
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25
19
14
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VI.
V.
IV.
III.
6
This classification corresponded sufficiently closely with our own estimate. Here again there is a long but very feeble tail. It is obvious that in a Class representing a year out of the school life there should not be a difference represented by four years in the attainments of the first and last dozen scholars. As it stands the Class reaches the Fifth Standard. It should reach the Sixth Standard, and would do so, were it not for the deficiencies of a score or more of boys who should never have been admitted into it.
In Class III a short story was read to fifteen boys selected by the examiners as representing the 3 Divisions. Eight gave the sense of it correctly; the rest failed through inability to follow it, though it was delivered several times over very slowly and distinctly. Only one out of the eight was in Division C: thus Divisions A and B passed 7 out of 10 which is creditable, and Division C failed utterly.