The native student'has not been slow to take advantage of the many educational advantages which the Imperial Government has luvished upon him with a free hand. The question which we now find ourselves bound to face is not to find more students for the branches of higher education, but to find suitable employment for those who have matriculated and taken University honours. It is not at all an unusual thing, especially in Madras, to find a B.A. working as an ordinary office clerk on fifty 1 pees month, and sometimes on even less!
doubtless speaks very well for a country of which so many of its sons are successful in obtaining University honours, but it is certainly not practical, or for the country's loud, to have so many of them at large with no employment. One is reminded of the old adage of one's nursery days, about one " Who finds some mischief still for idle hands to do." It has been proved that our present system of education has not turned out all that it was hoped or expected it would be. Especially has the system of cramming been carried to an extreme, with the result that we have a verity able army of semi-efficient clerks who have a general smattering of knowledge but whose ideas for the most part are totally unassimilated. After all, when we consider the matter, the education of a young Empire is very much the same, only on a wider scale, than that of a growing child. At first it needs only elementary education and this is a comparatively easy matter, but as the child grows, its brain develops, and its own individuality becomes marked, the question is more and more complex, and the teacher finds that he cannot entirely keep to theory, but must Suit his methods to the particular individual requirements of the child, That is, if it is his object to turn out not merely a machine but a thin! ing and reasoning human being. As in trade so in education, and so in all our
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.