country,
nearly all the County Councils having already appointed them. Some of
these teachers, who have made the best contributions towards the as yet
only partially determined question of the ultimate aim and present
possibilities of a course of instruction in hygiene, laundry work,
cookery, the management of children, sewing, and so forth, have told me
that the demand in rural districts seems to be chiefly for the class of
instruction which may lead to success in town life. I have heard of a
class of girls in a Connaught village who would not be content with
knowing the accomplishments of a farmer's wife until they had learned
how to make asparagus soup and cook sweetbreads. No doubt they had read
of the way things are done in the kitchens of the great. This tendency
should never be encouraged, but neither can it always be inflexibly
repressed without endangering the main objects of the class.

Women teachers of poultry-keeping, dairying, domestic science and
kindred subjects are trained at the Munster Institute, Cork, and the
School of Domestic Economy, Kildare Street, Dublin, both of which have
been equipped to meet the needs of the new programme. The want of
teachers, and not any lack of interest on the part of the country, has
alone prevented all the counties from adopting schemes for encouraging
improvement in all these branches of work. I may add that more than one
hundred and fifty of these qualified teachers are now at work under
County Committees.

I have already, in this chapter, indicated that outside large industrial
centres, our educational policy is, broadly speaking, twofold. We seek,
in the first place, through our programme in Experimental Science and
its allied subjects, now so generally adopted by secondary schools in
Ireland, to give that fundamental training in science and scientific
method which, most thinkers are agreed, constitutes a condition
precedent to sound specialised teaching of agriculture as well as other
forms of industry. We seek further, by methods less academic in
character--for example, by itinerant instruction which is of value
chiefly to those with whom 'school' is a thing of the past--to teach not
only improved agricultural methods but also simple industries, and to
promote the cultivation of industrial habits which are as essential to
the success of farming as to that of every other occupation. Classes in
manual work of various kinds--woodwork, carpentry, applied drawing and