272 INTERNATIONAL CONGRESS OF EDUCATION. 
broadening may be ruinous if it is not judiciously handled. In watering 
orowing plants, drowning may kill. All depends upon the skill of the 
seacher, and everything must be done for the single aim of developing the 
native power and putting the child in full possession of himself. 
DISCUSSION—RACE CHARACTERISTICS. 
G. W. Hicks, Inspector of Schools, Jamaica, West Indies : Ladies and Gentlemen— 
When my friend General Eaton said to me that he would be glad if I would say some- 
shing here this morning I could not say nay, for I thought possibly I might say a word 
about our educational condition in Jamaica that might be ot interest to you. The peo- 
ple of Jamaica have proceeded slowly but surely in the line of improvement, and I think 
that no one who knows what has been attempted in Jamaica and what is now being 
Jone in Jamaica can fail to form a very favorable opinion of the possibilities and prob- 
abilities of the future. Inthe thesis under discussion this morning my attention was 
specially attracted by the expression race characteristics ; and 1 have no doubt General 
Zaton had something of that in his mind when he asked me to speak upon this thesis. 
n Jamaica our people generally are of a race different from the Anglo-Saxon. They 
are a black people, and those whom we call the colored people, a mixed race, sometimes 
known as brown. They constitute the very great proportion of our population ; more 
shan nine-tenths. IT do not know that I can tell you what are their race characteristics. 
The people are different, but the differences may result from other causes than racial. 
The environment has been very different, and what shail finally be determined as racial 
sharacteristics I do not know. I have a very strong opinion that it will be found to be 
a difference in degree and not in kind. Certainly, so far as elementary education is 
roncerned, that which is best for the boys and girls here in America or in England is 
‘ound to be the best for the boys and girls in Jamaica. 
All boys and girls in all countries, of all races, need these three things: they need 
knowledge, power, and ability to do ; they also need aspiration, a high ideal, a reaching 
forward to something progressive. Now, the American boy in New England and in 
he Western States would find among his neighbors and in the community those 
fluences, those educational agencies which would largely give him power or ability to 
do and give him aspiration. He would get much of that also in his school. 
Our boys and girls in Jamaica need to find in the school that which is found here out- 
side of the school, One English gentleman, who visited your schools a generation ago, 
and greatly admired what was done here in America—admired the American schools 
and the American people—gave it as his opinion that while there was in America an 
unusual amount of intelligence among the people, and especially among the laboring 
people, that we owed less of it to the schools and more of it to the environment than 
was generally supposed. The environment in Jamaica is not very healthful. The 
r0omes are not those which give the impulse and the training that the homes of the New 
England farmers and the Western farmers, and the New England mechanics and the 
Vestern mechanics, give here in America. 
Now, the improvement will be not so very much perhaps by addition to the curricu- 
lum as by the method of teaching the studies in the school. If the teaching can be so 
done as to develop along in every study an ability to do, the child, when he leaves 
school, will have power. That would be an improvement. The lack of power is exempli- 
fied among our people in the building of the churches. Those who are ministers of the 
people come to them from England, Scotland, Germany, and some from America. 
They are continually adding to their church buildings. They are taking down the poor 
ones and building better ones. That is a sign of progress in Jamaica. They haven’t 
much money ; almost invariably the schoolmaster superintends these buildings. He 
has had no training as a carpenter or mason, but he has a general education and is 
chosen to supervise. He has to watch continually the carpenter and the mason whom 
he employs, lest they make great blunders. They can do the work if they are told just 
what to do ; but many of them appear to have that sort of ability which was possessed 
by the man who made a large hole in his door for his cat to go through, and then 
made a smaller hole for his kitten to go through. Unless they are watched, if they 
want a short piece of lumber they will take the longest piece there is to cut it from, 
instead of taking one of the shorter pieces and cutting the short piece from that.