Excerpt from Statistics of the Common Schools: Being a Digest and Comparison of the Evidence Furnished by the Local Superintendents and the Chief Superintendent, in Their Reports for 1855, With Suggestions Applicable to the Approaching Crisis, in a Series of Seven Letters

Sun - Your position [in the Government, your practical acquaint ance with the nature and requirements of Canadian society, and the eagerness with which all parties look to you for the settlement of those contentions, heartburnings, and jealousies, inseparably associated with the present system of Common Schools, are the reasons which I offer for addressing you on the subject, in this public form.

Whatever may have caused the existing difficulties, whether defects in the system, injudicious administration of the law, or both of these causes combined, of one thing at least there is a certainty, that the public mind is now so thoroughly convinced of the necessity of direct and immediate legislative action, that the Government can no longer escape the demand for a modification, in some shape, of the school system or school law, so as to reconcile and conciliate the various interests which are subject to its influence. In view of this emergency, and with the certain prospect of school legislation being forced on the Government at an early day, I may be excused for endeavouring to analyze and simplify the facts of the official returns, in such a way that the actual results, compared with the time, labor and money expended, may be more readily estimated.

A classification of the official data, indeed, becomes the more necessary when it is considered that the local reports are at variance with the inferences of the general report. It unfortunately happens, that too little importance has been ceded to the reports of the Local Superintendents. So much is this the case that it is scarcely possible to find an instance where their testimony is criticised or even'cited. On the contrary, the custom has been, on the appearance annually of the reports, to take the abstract of accounts furnished by the Chief Superintendent with his general statements and remarks, as an epitome of the contents of the local reports. I refer to the editorial comments of the newspaper press, in general, for the truth of what I here assert. The consequence is that the mind of the reading public has not beendrawn to the perusal of the most valuable body of evidence which could possibly be supplied and which has consequently been neglected, and, for any useful purpose, been completely lost. Yet they ought to be the basis of the general report, as they are the only legitimate means through which the condition of the schools can be ascertained. If it had been the case that the statements and remarks of the annual general report had been a faithful summary of the statements and remarks of the Local Superintendents, it would have signified little whether the local reports should have been noticed. But the vast discrepancy of the figures and statements of the one when contrasted with those of the other, makes it a subject of regret that the discrepancy should have been so completely overlooked; for, thereby, the usefulness of the Local Superintendents has not been properly appreciated and sustained, and the continuance of defects has been concealed when they might easily have been detected.

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