FOREWORD

I have read with pleasure and profit Mr. N.K. Venkateswaran's book, On Teacing (His earlier volume, The Dreams of a Teacher, has set many a teacher dram healthy dreams of an educational heaven within reach. The author is a practicing teacher of experience and like most practical teachers, he is a sort of rebel against conventional teaching methods. I have often listened with interest to his `tirades' against collective teaching disguising itself as modern educational practice. He has little faith in big classes of forty and fifty pupils that have come into vogue in recent years and books as if they have come to stay. In his `Dreams' he visualises a scheme of education in which the teacher will deal more with the pupil than with the class. His ideas naturally pre-suppose in the teacher wide scope for individuality unhampered by rigid curricula of studies and unrelenting examinations.

It is often said, with a good deal of truth, that the Indian teacher is mainly occupied in the assimilation of ideas other than his own followed by their reproduction in the class-room. The charge of lack of originality is adequately disproved in this book, On Teaching. These pages show genuine thought and genuine expression, and plead, eloquently, for a change, both, in the outlook and in the practice of the teacher. Mr. Venkateswaran pleads for energy, courage and over-growing knowledge combined with a living sympathy for the individual pupil in the teacher.

Mr. Venkateswaran has much faith in this Socratic method of teaching by questions. Himself an excellent story-teller, he has implicit faith in the story as an educational instrument; himself accustomed to independent thinking, he believes in the training of pupils to think for themselves instead of drilling them in others' thoughts, which must cramp even their freedom of love and sympathy; he reminds the teacher that correction is often provocative of the very faults it would put down. To him, the school is a place offering as good chance for the building of character as for the giving of instruction. His chapter on this subject provides good food for thought. The author has something practical to say on the preparation and presentation of lessons and his carefully written chapter on this important topic will be a source of inspiration to every teacher. Mr. Venkateswaran is always fresh, and his forceful language and wealth of

I am sure that this little book will commend itself to all those interested in education or in teaching, embodying as it does the helpful and refreshig thoughts and experiences of one whose good work and outstanding ability and undoubted love for the profession have rightly won him the esteem of those who have come in contact with him.

U. RAMAKRISHNA KUKILLAYA
Inspector of Schools

OFFICE OF THE INSPECTOR OF
ENGLISH SCHOOLS, TRAVANCORE,

26^th June, 1930, Trivandrum.