Education does not proceed even now at any violent pace.
From the recent Report drawn up by the Inspectors of Scheele, it ap- pears that about sixty per cent, of the children presented within the last year for examination have acquitted themselves credit- I ably. Reading, the Lispectors say, is the weak point in most schools ; in Hampshire and Dorsetshire, "good reading, distinct, intelligent, and expressive, is not often met with." "Manuals of elocution," also, one Inspector complains, "are not habitually used,"—(when, we wonder, was a manual of elocution of any service to any human creature ?) Perhaps if the case be no worse than this, we need not despond ; it would be hard, we fancy, to find, even in the highest-grade public schools, any super- fluity of "distinct, intelligent, and expressive reading." The real cause of this failing is, we suspect, as the Inspector for East Lancashire says, that boys are too bashful to show off their powers of acting or elocution before their companions ; nevertheless, it is gratifying to learn that they sometimes become eloquent under the soothing influence of a private interview. The girls, the same gentleman remarks, are, as might have been expected, more gushing. The spelling appears to be, as a rule, better than either the reading or writing. We are not, however, surprised to find that in East Kent " home pronunciation" has seriously -retarded the progress of the children in this branch of their studies. With regard to arithmetic, the Inspectors complain that the children prefer to resort to any long and laborious calculation rather than employ their reasoning faculties. The same reluctance unfortunately crops up in reading as well as arithmetic, notably in Devonshire, where a small urchin considered that the Standards under which troops march to battle are "daily papers."
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