I say that the real solution of the knotty Anglo-Chinese problem has never been approached yet. For it is, like every other educational problem, at bottom a question in psychology. I mean in the science of the international affinities and incompatibilities of human nature. So long as Victoria College continues to disregard the peculiarities of Chinese child-nature, and persists in omitting to link the old world of Chinese thought and life, from which these children come, with that new world of English mental and social life into which they are plunged when they take up an English primer or reader, this refusal to lead the children on by easy steps from the known to the unknown is bound, by the laws of nature, to result in continuous failure as to the results of the English teaching of the School, Oral and pictorial object lessons ought to be a principal means not only to teach conversational English but to lead up to elementary science lessons, of which there is next to nothing at present, throughout the School. Instead of cramming the boys' heads with dates and events, facts and genealogical details of English history, for which they do not care a straw!
Instead of worrying them to remember every country and river, hill and promontory of England with which they have no connection, they ought to be taught the geography of Hong-Kong, the Canton province and China before they are expected to learn any details of the geography of Europe. Here again object lessons, by means of blank maps, ought to be largely used through oral instruction, with a view to create in them imaginative ...
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