ooner the infant mind was introduced to these subjects the
better the after-result might be expected to be. Thus the grant-earning
capacity of the child became the teacher's chief consideration. In the
second place, the energies of the teacher were directed to secure a
certain mechanical accuracy in the use of the three elementary arts
rather than their intelligent apprehension. As a consequence, these
subjects came in time to be thought of as subjects worthy of attainment
for their own sake and their acquisition as an end in itself. Hence it
was forgotten that the acquisition and organisation of these systems of
elementary knowledge are only valuable because they are the
indispensable means of all intercourse, of all commerce, and of all
culture. Hence also their use as instruments for the after-realisation
of many purposes in life tended to be neglected, or at least to fall
into the background. Individual teachers, no doubt, in many cases
realised the partial error in this conception of the aims of the Primary
School, but the demands of Government inspectors and of school
authorities, with their rule-of-thumb methods of testing the success of
the teacher's work by the percentage of passes gained, tended often to
make the teacher, in spite of his better judgment, look upon the child
mainly as a three-R grant-earning subject and to consider the chief aim
of primary education to be the securing of a certain mechanical
proficiency in the use of the three elementary arts.

Under such a method of examination it was certainly necessary for the
teacher to pay some attention to the individuality of the child. If his
efforts were to be at all successful it was incumbent upon him to
discover as early as possible the range of the child's previous
knowledge in the three grant-earning subjects and to find out in which
of the three the power of acquisition of the child was naturally weak or
naturally strong. Where the number of children in a class was large,
little individual attention could, of course, be paid to the child, and
in such cases the acquisition of the subject was aided by the mechanical
drilling of sections of the class and by recourse to all manner of
devices for ensuring the accurate acquisition of the essential subjects.

As a result of this partial and one-sided conception little attention
was paid to the use to which these subjects may be put in the
realisation of the practical ends of life. Arithmetic, _e.g._, se