She also gave some account of her own methods of teaching. French and German were studied before Latin and Greek. In Geometry she always dealt with the propositions as riders, and employed methods which, twenty years later, became common in all schools. This was somewhat extraordinary at a time when many children, boys and girls alike, understood so little of what was required, that they learned the propositions by heart. Science was taught so as to create not specialists but human beings with an intelligent but general understanding of the phenomena of everyday life. It is interesting to read in a pamphlet published this year, 1919, by the Ministry of Reconstruction, that much of the present day lack of interest in Science is due to the lack of general training of this kind. Foundations are laid at school as if every man and every woman were going to be a scientist, and the average boy and girl leave school with a certain amount of skill in measuring and weighing, but with none of that illuminating general knowledge that makes the world so vastly interesting. In religious teaching, “we try,” said Dorothea Beale, “to make our teaching practical as regards the daily duties of life upon which we are all agreed, instead of dwelling on points of doctrine wherein we differ”. Dorothea Beale was always anxious to work in sympathy with parents, not in antagonism to their aims. She realised, as does every wise teacher, that parents see a quite different side of their children and was glad of any information that might be a help in understanding the child. She was very desirous that people should be frank with her if there was any cause of dissatisfaction with the school, and was most anxious to know if a child was at all overworked. Any complaint of this kind was at once dealt with, and if a child was overworked the remedy of dropping one or two subjects was usually applied. Along with other educationalists of that day Miss Beale deplored the excessive amount of time given to the practice of the piano, complaining that it absorbed energies that ought to be used for the general culture of the mind. She suggested that no girl should give more than one hour a day to the piano, unless she had decided talent, that parents should cease to attach so exaggerated a value to this accomplishment, and that those who had a natural incapacity should be allowed to leave off music altogether. Our generation is beginning at last to allow music for girls to take only its fair share of time along with other subjects and to train the mind and soul to appreciate rather than the hands merely to perform. We are beginning to realise that born musicians are few, though the need for music in life is universal. To train the ear to hear, the body to feel rhythm, is held to be more important than the mere technique of piano-playing. CHAPTER VII. GROWTH.