The report of the English Central Board dealing with the subject of examinations held in some of the Leicestershire schools suggests that candidates should be examined more severely on their spelling ability. It was remarked by more than one examiner that the system of marking enabled bad spellers to score too highly, and one of the commonest defects noted was the inability of many pupils to spell their own names correctly. Not high falutin' names but ordinary common or garden Christian names. Those who have to do a great deal of writing will sympa-thie with the young whose minds trouble with nothing but phonetics. As compared with the very fancy way in which many words are written, phonetics have much to commend them, but directly an attempt was made to adopt such style of writing for general use, the introduction of standard methods of reproducing sound would in a short while create nearly as many difficulties as modern spelling dors now, due principally to the fact that all persons do not hear the same word alike. On the other hand possibly the introduction of some sort of shorthand from the earliest years of a child's life and the general adoption of such a system would have very material benefits, not the least of which Svould be the ability to extend the scope examinations through the possibility of doing more writing in a given time.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.