CO129-567-1 Education Department 8-6-1938 - 3-2-1939 — Page 21

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year. This was due to the unsatisfactory preparation in

the Primary Schools and the poor English attainments of

the Chinese teachers in the Secondary Schools. And

this could not be mended until better educated and trained

local teachers were available.

A beginning had already been made, owing to

aconomic reasons, for a partial replacement of European

teachers by Chinese teachers. No doubt this was a process

which had to be continued but the more that policy was

followed the more important became adequate training for

Chinese teachers.

Teachers in the second category were Anglo-Chinese

(non-graduated) teachers. They mainly staffed the Grant-

in-Aiù schools, as the latter could not afford to pay the

salaries of grauuate teachers. The arrangement proposed

for training these teachers followed almost the same lines

of the two-year training colleges in England. The

difficulty would be, at first, at any rate, assuming that

English would be the medium of instruction during the first

course, that many of the students would begin their courses

with an inadequate knowledge of the language. Some

caution might be suggested to those responsible for drawing

up the curriculum of the course, beiore the Government

adopted uncritically the recommendations of the Memorandum

which constituted Appendix I and seemed seriously to

overload the course.

As regards the Vernacular teachers for rural

schools (the third category), it was recommened that the

example of Africa should be followed to a considerable

extent.

Hr. Sayer, in his Minority report, doubted

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whether