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54 4 OUR ISLAND STORY

.This report of the Committee was adopted—~though not

unanimously; and “The Free Education Act, 1852” was the result.

In the course of his speceh at the prorogation of the Legislature, the Lieutenant Governor declared that it afforded him “great satisfaction to find that the anxious attention the members of the Legislature had bestowed upon the important question of Education had terminated in the passage of a measure which could not fail to be productive of great good to the public at large,“

—--and so it proved. By the Free Education Act of 1853 it was provided that the

Board of Education should consist of seven members. The Board was given control of all the schools, with power to examine can'- didates for teachers’ license, and to license to teach those whose teaching ability had been previously tested and certified to the head master of the Central Academy, to re-examine teachers ~ already licensed at the end of the current year, and to re-engage those found to be efficient.

Not more than two hundred free schools were to be estab- lished; and the schools were to be not less than three miles apart. The control of each school was vested in a local board of school trustees to consist of five persons. All children‘in the district who were upwards of five years of age might be admitted to the school; and children residing outside the boundaries of the school ' district might attend the nearest school. Fees were not any longer to be demanded of scholars attending any school of which the teacher received payment out of the public treasury.

At the opening’of the Legislature on the 18th of February, 1860, Lieut. Governor Dundas directed attention to the necessity which then existed “of perfecting the system of Education through- out the Island.” Particularly he invited consideration of “the

' propriety of reconstructing the arrangements on which the Cent-p

ral Academy was based in order that the increasing requirements for instruction in the higher branches of learning might be .met and the usefulness of the Academy augmented.”

Accordingly, an Act was forthwith passed “to establish a College in Prince Edward Island under the name and style of Prince of Wales College.” It was provided that the Lieutenant Gover-