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nergy. The for Chinese Masters, receiving each a salary of $29 a month for working three hours a day during brief seasons, are absurdly overpaid. The absence of responsibility and the total exclusion of Anglo-Chinese translation lessons from this division of the School, in which not a word of English is ever heard, are the principal defects in the organization of this Chinese School.
9.
Methods. The principal characteristic of the methods in vogue in Victoria College is that they are a slavish imitation of the methods of an English Grammar School in utter oblivion of the fact that the boys of Victoria College come to school not only profoundly ignorant of English colloquial and of every thing English but with their heads crammed full of un-English or anti-English ideas, and a deal of Chinese bookish learning. Were these boys in the preparatory classes of Victoria College treated as babies are dealt with in English infant schools, a sound foundation would be laid for English knowledge. They want to be taught to talk; their tongue, their ear, their eyes required to be opened first to those to them fantastic sounds and forms of English words and things; they require object lessons in conversational English with oral interpretation in colloquial Chinese, before they are worried with spelling and reading of words concerning things and social relations of which they have no conception. The preparatory classes and the lower school ought to make it their particular aim to gather up the threads of the boys' Chinese mental attainments and to weave them gently into lessons in English. Nothing of this sort has as yet been attempted and therefore an ...