(d) Educational value. From the papers and from the inspection a summarized classification of schools as to their educational value has been made. The questions found on pages 171*-6* will show the simple test of efficiency. In an efficient school children can read intelligently, write at dictation a simple sentence free from gross errors in spelling, punctuation, and capitals, perform a few mental examples in Arithmetic. Advanced classes have a little more difficult test in language and Arithmetic. The teaching is skillful,

and management is kind and firm.

The schools of the county are divided into efficient, useful, doing some good, and entirely inefficient.

(a) A uniform, but not too high standard of qualification for teachers, to be uniformly applied by competent persons.

(b) A system of supervision and organization securing continuous advancement of classes and a recognition of the work pursued in the schools by one teacher after another.

We should not have been content with the results here portrayed, if we had not all along kept up the pleasing fiction that schools are what they ought to be. For a period of six to ten years, children are detained in school, under a disjointed course and aimless teaching, and at the end of that time they are unable, in any just sense, to "read, write, and cipher." Is the result commensurate with the labor and time expended? Might not the time and labor differently expended have produced something decidedly better? Is not the immense disparity between the time and labor expended and the result obtained the best evidence that the means and methods have not been directed most wisely

to the avowed end? Shall not this State "of old and high renown," entertain an "increasing purpose" to extend to all her children - the light of our homes and the hope of the future — something more and better? Shall not the notion false everywhere, fatal in education - that the past is the perfect expression of human competency, be cast out, and our systems of administration, and our ways of teaching, look, not forever backward, but always steadfastly forward?

CHARLES D. HINE.

The following tables are compiled from the returns which the law requires School Visitors to make to the Board of Education.

By way of explanation it may be said :—

I.

The Grand List of each town is taken from the Comptroller's report to the General Assembly, January, 1889.

2. The per cent. of taxable property appropriated for public schools is based upon the total amount received for school purposes diminished by the amounts received from school fund, etc., town deposit fund, and local funds.

3. The amount paid for each enumerated scholar is found by dividing the total amount expended, less amount paid for new buildings, by number enumerated.

4. As has been the custom for a number of years past, the number "registered in Winter" is found by combining the number returned for Fall and Winter terms, taking the highest number found in either.

5. The "average attendance in Winter" is found in the same manner.

6. The number between 8 and 14 in no school, indicates the number which escaped the operation of the compulsory law, in the year ending January I, 1888.

7. The "per cent. who have attended some part of the year" compares the "different scholars" with the "enumeration." The large per cents., attained by some small towns, are explained by the attendance of scholars not enumerated.

8. Regularity of attendance and efficiency in this direction are indicated by the "per cent. of attendance on basis of registration."

9. The "

per cent. of attendance on basis of enumeration" is found by dividing the average attendance for the year by the enumeration.

A