86
store but in a dilapidated condition through disuse from which also the stores of the chemical laboratory appear to suffer. The playgrounds are virtually useless and none of the Masters considers it his calling to encourage or organize any use of them.
5.
Aim of the School. This School established in 1861 for the special benefit of the Chinese community has aimed from the beginning at giving at the same time both an elementary Chinese education in the Chinese language and an elementary English education with the use of both the English and Chinese languages, but for the sake of unity the ordinary methods of teaching Chinese have always been more or less anglicized. The hybrid Anglo-Chinese character of the School, which has no counterpart in social life, involves enormous difficulties. Two languages and two codes of civilization of absolutely irreconcilable tendencies are forcibly welded together. Two sets of Masters, English and Chinese, who cannot or will not work in mutual subordination or even cooperation, because each set retains its own antagonistic national bias, have to be employed. As cooperation is, with the present Chinese staff, impossible, some classes are taught by Englishmen only, others by Chinese teachers only. Englishmen unable to read or speak Chinese with facility have to teach Chinese translation for which they acknowledge themselves incompetent and to supervise classes under instruction in classical Chinese. Chinamen anti-English to the backbone and unable to pronounce English correctly or to speak it idiomatically, and even to teach English dictation, grammar, and composition. Consequently, the school resembles a garden in which