The foregoing true account of educational matters in Korea is further confirmed and expanded by the Official Report more recently given out in the name of the Residency-General.[73] The report, however, notices the existence of the accepted means of education for the village children in the provinces. These means were employed, after a debased Confucian system, in so-called _Syo-bang_ by a sort of village dominie, who gathered about him the children of the neighborhood and taught them the rudiments of reading and writing the vernacular. There were in 1894 some ten thousand of these schools scattered throughout the peninsula. In the barest rudiments of the native language the instruction they gave was deficient; of modern education in other matters, there was nothing. In Seoul there was also a high-school of Confucian learning (a _Syöng-Kyūn-Koan_); where the students were taught the three “Primary” and the four “Middle Classics,” and were given some lessons in history, geography, composition and mathematics. The same Report further agrees with the Article in the _Korean Review_ in considering the reforms proclaimed in 1894 by the government as ineffective. The schools which sprung up under the “Primary School Ordinance,” with the intention of introducing the Western system of education, were almost without exception of the old (_Shobo_) character. And, indeed, how could it be otherwise, when there were no teachers who could give the rudiments of a modern education, and few pupils who desired such an education? As for the middle-grade education which the Seoul schools professed to give, there was little or nothing to bear out their pretensions. [Illustration: Street Scene in Seoul.] The Residency-General aims, therefore, “at nothing less than the establishment of an entirely new system of education for Korea.” But the system does not propose to interfere with, much less wholly to close, the existing old-fashioned Confucian institutions. It will, the rather, gradually displace them by something better. The Government system as now planned contemplates supplying the nation with the necessary schools of the different grades, in accordance with the outline of reforms given below. 1. The former “Primary Schools” have been renamed “Common Schools.” The Common School Ordinance and Regulations have been drawn up and put in practice; the ten primary schools of various kinds in Seoul having been turned into Government Common Schools, and the thirteen Primary Schools in the provinces into Public Common Schools. The class work under the new _régime_ was begun in September, 1905, in all these schools. It has been arranged, further, to establish Public Common Schools in twenty-seven principal cities and towns of the provinces in April this year.