Sir John Gorst, the Vice-President of the Council, made a
good speech at the Drapers' Hall on Wednesday, after dis- tributing the prizes to the boys and girls in the manual. training classes, in which he said that Governments never initiate experiments in education, and are indeed very slow at adopting the original experiments of others. There- fore he was all for keeping up the voluntary schools, in which all the better and more original experiments are made. People forget, he says, that it is a rather difficult art to draw out the different capacities of different children, and in order to effect this purpose, all sorts of new suggestions must be entertained and must be embodied in different tentatives in different schools. Those who make such experiments are called faddists, and their attempts are called fads ; but it is to faddists and their fads that some of the best educational methods are due. Sir John Gorst also contrasted the monotonous work of industrial schools carried on for the benefit of those institutions themselves, with the excellent teaching in the manual-training schools, where children are really trained with the view of developing their own minds. It is clear that Sir John Gorst's sympathies for all that is original and enterprising in the work of education, make him a very excellent head of the Educational Department, and one likely to combat its worst tendency,—a tendency to an organised monotony.
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