ELEMENTARY , TEACHERS AND INSPECTORSHIPS OF SCHOOLS.
(To THE EDITOR OF THE 'SPECTATOR.")
your issue of April 23rd, you comment briefly on a
paper read by the Rev. E. F. MacCarthy before the National Union of Elementary Teachers. May I be permitted to add a few remarks to yours on the claim put forward by the Union, and supported by Mr. MacCarthy, to Government Inspectorships of Schools ?
The Union—I say Union, rather than teachers, because I am not sure how far, in this and other matters, it expresses the wisest thought of the great body of elementary teachers—the Union appears to base its claim in great measure upon a false assumption, viz., that elementary teachers and Government Inspectors belong, not only to the same profession, which of course they do, but also to the same branch of it, which they do not. The idea seems to be that, as a curate may, in the natural course of promotion, become a Bishop, so an elementary schoolmaster, by virtue of his position as such, should be able to feel that ho has some chance of rising to the higher post of a Government Inspectorship. Now, it may readily be granted that, as you suggest, the service should be made more hierarchical, and that better prizes than are at present ordinarily within their reach might well be offered to the teachers ; but their claim to a share of Government Inspectorships, while these posts carry with them their present duties, may, nevertheless, be shown to be the reverse of reasonable.
As I have said, the elementary teacher and the Government Inspector, though belonging to the same profession of education, do not belong to the same branch of it. Their work, though of course it touches, is 'quite distinct, and demands widely different qualifications. What would be thought, if solicitors wore to advance a claim to appointments as police. magistrates or County-court Judges ; or if policemen were to complain because the chief constables of counties are not selected from their ranks ; or if dispensing chemists were to contend that they are the fittest persons to be appointed medical officers of health ?
The necessary acquaintance with the routine of an elementary school, which the teacher has, but which the University graduate ordinarily has not, may be very quickly gained ; for it must be remembered that a Government inspector has to do with results more than with methods, and that the wide range of his ex- perience soon supplies him with means for estimating pretty correctly the relative, if not the actual, merit of a school. Moral and social qualifications apart, what an Inspector, with two or three hundred schools to have a knowledge of, and award. to each its clue proportion of praise or blame, most requires, is the judicial faculty, together with a quiet ietelligeuce and some knowledge of the .world ; and no special familiarity with educational method and routine, valuable and useful though that may be, will compensate for the want of these.
So far as primdfacie fitness for the work institutes a claim, appointments should be given to the masters, not of our elementary, but of our public, schools.
With you, Sir, I should be glad to see new ways of promotion, rational and progressive, opened up to the deserving body of Elementary Teachers ; but I hold that a claim to be made Government Inspectors, as this service is at present organised, to be warranted neither by reason nor by analogy.—I am,.
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