SPECIAL TRAINING FOR TEACHERS. go THE EDITOR DV THE SPEOTATOR.'l
SIR,—Your correspondent in last week's issue, writing on behalf of the excellent Training College in Skinner Street for Teachers for Girls' High Schools, says he knows of no other institution where so complete .a training is given to teachers of this grade. As this ignorance of what is being done elsewhere seems general among the members of the Teachers' Training and Registration Society, and cannot but be injurious to its real interests, will you allow me to mention at least two other Colleges where this work has been, and is being, carried on, with equal care and success, for I believe some twenty years past P
One is the College at Milton Mount, in Kent, where, in a largo and very successful high-grade school, seventy students are being trained as teachers for schools of the same class. The other, with which I am more intimately acquainted, is the Ladies' College at Cheltenham, where from twenty-five to thirty students are being trained as teachers. There is a foundation, for twenty of these, which reduces the total expense of board, lodging, and education to 250 a year ; all who come on this foundation must prepare for one of the higher University: examinations. In addition to their own education, they are trained for teaching by attending model lessons given by a skilled staff of mistresses in the thoroughly- organised. school of five hundred girls, and in the Kindergarten; they receive method lessons ; they make corrections, and give class lessons themselves, in the presence of the mistresses, which are- subsequently criticised. This College is limited to the 'daughters of gentlemen, and the leaders are of the same class.
Hence the discipline is so complete, that there are no punish- ments, which of itself must afford the most valuable moral training a young teacher of girls can have. In both these Colleges, the religious instruction given being regarded as paramount, the training of the pupil-teachers includes practice and instruction in giviug Scripture lessons.
There can be no .rivalry between such institutions as these three, each doing such thorough work, and as yet so inadequate in point of numbers to the needs of our girls in the upper and middle classes ; but it would be a misfortune, if the youngest institution should be regarded as the only one.—I am, Sir, &c.,
L. F. lot.
[It will be seen that by an unfortunate misprint, the mean- ing of our correspondent, Mr. Sully, which merely doubted the existence of any such training schools for male teachers in this grade, appeared to deny the existence of other such training schools for teachers of either sex.—ED. Spectator.]
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