The best trained and most efficient of our young teachers, in general, are those who have first been pupil-teachers and who have afterwards passed a year at the Training College. The pupil-teacher is a boy or girl who, as the name implies, is at once learning and teaching; getting private lessons from the master and taking a class during the day. The pupil-teacher in theory passes an examination at entrance and an examination every year, and receives a small stipend, that is gradually augmented as the services paid for become more and more valuable. In some cases the pupil-teacher, on conclusion of a five years' course, becomes a trainee at a so-called Training College. This is a school in a large town, the head master of which receives a salary of £50 a year as training master, and a bonus on all the pupils he sends up who pass a successful examination. Besides this, he gains indirectly by securing the services of the best pupil-teachers in his school. From the school or district training college the pupil-teacher passes to the Training College in Melbourne, presided over by Mr. Gladman, and spends a year under the direction of teachers paid by the State in preparing for a final examination. If this is successfully passed, the trainee receives a certificate, and passes with credit into the State service.

The advantages of this plan are very great. In the first place, it supplies the State with a body of efficient teachers, who could not be procured as cheaply, or perhaps at all, in any other way. In the next place, as the pupil-teacher has very commonly been a scholar in whom the head teacher took particular interest, the page 136 relation of these assistants to their head is often very cordial and pleasant; and many head teachers have told me how much they preferred the young people trained by themselves to the assistants sent them by the department. Lastly, though the beginning of educational work so early is necessarily accompanied with some short-comings in the pupil-teacher's literary accomplishments, it undoubtedly gives a command of teaching power which it is more difficult to acquire later in life. The pupil-teacher learns a little less than the teacher who has not graduated in class-work, but generally can communicate knowledge and enforce order very much better.

The defects of the present system are, however, very great. In the first place, the rule by which a pupil-teacher moves on a step every year is not rigidly enforced; and I am informed that some head teachers, anxious to retain the services of efficient pupil-teachers, will deliberately keep them back a year, to the loss of the pupil-teacher and the detriment of the public service. In the next place, the pupil-teachers are seriously overworked in their last year. Then it is that the great strain of preparing for the Training College comes upon them; and the attempt to combine four or five hours' class-work with several hours of preparation is often attended with serious injury to the health. I know that head teachers will extremely dislike to lose any part of their pupil-teachers' services in the last year, but in common justice to these young men and women it ought to be done. Thirdly, there is no common system at the various training schools, and the pupils come up in every stage of knowledge, to be put together in the same classes in Melbourne. But, lastly, the Melbourne Training College is itself most imperfectly organized. The scheme of work is too vast to be carried out; the teaching power is deficient;^* and the pupils, living with their friends, or dispersed among different boarding-houses, never acquire that esprit de corps which it should be the function of a training college to impart.