teachers who are in that medical grade only on account of defective vision are being called to the forces. We know of several honours graduates who are filling in forms in Army Pay Corps offices which could be completed by boys of 17. These men would be far more profitably employed in the schools, and the imminent calling up of older men with the consequent increase in staffing difficulties ought to be followed by the return to the schools of all enlisted Grade III teachers.

THE fact that, as from March 1, over 300,000 Civil

Servants received an increase in their war bonus has strengthened the demand for a more adequate bonus for teachers. Civil Servants earning The War not more than £250 a year now receive Bonus. IOS. per week (men) or 7s. 6d. (women) in place of the present 5s. Moreover, men earning between £250 and £350 a year now get 5s., and women earning between £250 and £300 get 4s. In the face of these figures there can be no excuse for restricting the war bonus payable to teachers to those in receipt of salaries not exceeding £260-and even this meagre award is not being universally applied, for only 277 out of 315 local authorities have up to now accepted the recommendations in their entirety. The teachers asked at first for 6 per cent on the first £300 and 3 per cent on the next £200, though the increased cost of living has since made these proposals inadequate. As The A.M.A. remarks, it is becoming increasingly clear that the conditions of hardship consequent upon the war operate over the whole range of salaries received by teachers. The cost of living has increased by 26 per cent, and, though nobody would claim that teachers should have their salaries raised by this amount, they are bearing more than their fair share of the common burden. We hope there will be no further delay in arriving at an equitable settlement of this problem.

MANY people have been disturbed by the increase

in juvenile crime which has occurred since the war began, but, as The Times Educational Supplement after paying a well-deserved tribute to Juvenile Crime. probation officers remarks in a leading

article, the most potent cause of this increase is the broken home, with consequent lack or weakening of parental care and control. Clubs and youth centres, properly run, should be both controls and directives, but it is necessary to begin earlier. "Every new day nursery, every new nursery centre and nursery school, is a safeguard against adolescent delinquency; every bottle of milk consumed in school, every physical defect remedied by the school medical service, and still more-when we reach the pitch of caring as much for mental as for physical health-every inhibition removed and repression eased, will add its quota to the tale of prevention. Every reform in the school curriculum tending to reduce feelings of tension and frustration brings aid to the attack upon juvenile crime, as does every alteration in the life of the school community bringing a greater access of ordered freedom. . . . Every measure, in fact, which reduces the strains and tensions of industrial, social, or domestic life will reduce the

number of youthful offenders. Any measure which does not reduce strain is but a palliative, or worse." These wise words deserve the most careful attention. We agree with our contemporary that even in war-time a beginning could be made by establishing more nursery centres, play centres, and youth centres, by giving more attention to the nutrition and health of children, and by reducing the working hours of younger adolescents in industry.

THE Lanarkshire Education Committee

have

appointed a sub-committee with a view to getting all Scottish local authorities to meet on the subject of juvenile crime. In the early part of the Juvenile Crime war there was no remarkable increase in Scotland. in the incidence of juvenile misdemeanour of a serious kind, but more recent reports all go to show that the figures are moving up in a disquieting manner. A strong plea against the setting up of more remand or approved schools was made on the ground that these simply led to Borstal and to prison, an unjustifiable reflection on the good work done in many approved schools. schools. Child guidance clinics for the psychological treatment of offenders are also advocated, although the workers at such clinics would themselves be the first to doubt whether, without sustained parental assistance, much could be done. It is precisely this lack of parental control, together with all the exciting and disturbing features of war-time existence, that is making for the increase, a fact strongly stressed in such annual reports as that of the Edinburgh Juvenile Organizations Committee. We feel that, while the approved school will remain essential for many a day to come, the claim of the residential child guidance centre such as that set up by the Glasgow Education Committee must receive close study.

Log-books in Welsh Schools.

sent a letter to all directors of education and clerks of education authorities in Wales urging authorities to collect and preserve in central repositories all expired log-books of schools within their jurisdiction and to compile surveys of their contents. The response was disappointing except in the Diocese of St. David's, which covers the counties of Carmarthen, Cardigan, and Pembroke, where the diocesan authorities had co-operated in collecting and sending to the library a large number of log-books of non-provided schools. Cardiganshire, in which the National Library is situated, and Carmarthenshire are also co-operating actively in this matter. These important records are lying about in school cupboards and the box-rooms of vicarages, and will soon be lost unless some intelligent effort be made for their preservation. To the research student they provide material for a vivid history of education in Wales besides which the ordinary text-book on the history of education would, indeed, be a dry-as-dust volume. Here would be a record of the journey of the ark of the covenant' through the arid deserts of payment by results' days, and the days of chalk, slate and duster', to the more spacious days of pre-war times and the dawn of happiness and freedom in our schools.

I

AM so far in sympathy with almost everything said by Mr. Jacks in his article in the January number of The Journal and with his approach to the professional education of the teacher (evidently he dislikes the term training of teachers as much as I do) that I find it difficult to write on the same subject without laying myself open to the charge of plagiarism. If I can usefully supplement what he has said so admirably, it will be by trying to emphasize those aspects of the subject which particularly concern the residential training colleges, since, except as a student a good many years ago, I have had no personal experience of a university training department.

There are three principal factors which must determine the character of the professional preparation of a teacher for his work, and without constant reference to them all discussion of the subject must be nebulous and unreal. There is the educational system for work in which he is to be prepared; there is the quality of the human material which presents itself for preparation; and there is the quality estimated in terms of personality, competence, and professional experience of those by whom the work of preparation is performed.

If the objective of the preparation is shifting or illdefined, the training colleges cannot wholly be held to blame if they do not always achieve it. That, I believe, is the position at present. The educational system includes, of course, the actual organization of the schools to which young teachers are appointed. That organization has been for the past dozen years in a state of transition. To take only one example the publication of the Hadow Report, the raising of the school-leaving age, and its probable further rise, and the growing tendency (exemplified and reinforced by the Spens Report) to regard the education of all children over II as one, have suggested an altogether new picture of the school life for which the teachers of senior children will be responsible. But reorganization in many areas has lagged-in fact if not in name-far behind the vision of reformers. If it is true, as I think it is, that in some respects, to quote Mr. Jacks, we are training for the schools of a generation ago", it is also true that we are partly training for senior schools which in many parts of the country do not yet exist.

"

But the organization and interconnexion of schools, like the education provided within them, should embody some principles, some philosophy of education, upon which there is a large measure of agreement. This is not true of English education to-day, and the preparation of the teacher is made all the more difficult. The young teacher is apt to be "hot for certainties", and the anomalies and discrepancies of which English education is full return him " a dusty answer". He develops both a professional and a personal impatience with the compromises and silences covering the issues on which the country has never quite made up its mind. Examples occur readily. There is the place of religion in our schools, about which there lies so thick a mist of intellectual dishonesty. There is the delicate question about education for citizenship-should it include positive inculcation in what the teacher holds to be democratic principles? There is the question so frequently asked now in connexion with the future of the public schools, but of much wider application, whether schools are to continue to be differentiated by social gradation, a question with which is intimately connected the whole problem of the status of the teacher in the community.

The relation between the teacher and society is bound to engage the attention of those helping to prepare young teachers for their future work, and that for two reasons. The teacher is from one point of view the agent by whom society hands on what is best in its traditions to the rising

generation, and by whom that generation is aided to pass without unnecessary strain and stress from the necessary period of tutelage into membership of adult communities. It is extremely desirable, therefore, that his own education should enable him to acquire an attitude to society which is derived from something other than prejudice or emotion. One result, and that not the least, of what he learns about human nature at college, whether by way of a course of psychology or otherwise, should be a conviction that a merely resentful or impatient attitude to the society in which he lives, and to its institutions and traditions, is not good enough. I am not advocating that he should not feel strongly about the political and social problems of the day. All kinds of healthy sixth-form extremisms may well be among the ingredients to be found in this particular meltingpot. But, if the life and teaching of a college do not make a young man less suggestible to the Cleons of the twentieth century, and do not help him to temper strong convictions with a habit of clear thinking, they will have failed in one important part of their function.

In quite another sense, too, it is desirable that social preparation should form part of professional preparation. No doubt the status of the teaching profession as a whole has improved considerably in popular esteem during the past thirty years. But it would be simply untrue to say that even to-day all teachers are counted as professional men in the same sense as, say, doctors or solicitors, though some certainly are so regarded. Whatever we may think about the profession being unified-to my mind the word smacks a little too much of uniformity-we all want to see it united, and one step to that end will be achieved if in their course of training young teachers who have experienced different kinds of social and economic conditions can come together and learn to understand conventions and traditions with which previously they have not been familiar.

With regard to the quality of those entering training colleges, nobody can work in one of them for a few years without appreciating the aggregate of good will, good sense, and even enthusiasm which they receive year by year. But one must be realistic, and to appreciate the many merits and good intentions of those who offer themselves for admission and are accepted, is not necessarily to hold that they are as a whole good enough for the work of outstanding importance for which they are required. The demands of the popular schools of the country, as envisaged for example in the Board's Suggestions to Teachers, are exacting, and education, when it is among other things a contest against shallow materialism and crude suggestibility, requires a better equipped combatant than when it was primarily a contest against illiteracy. In academic ability the entrants to a training college may be spread over a wide range. Although there is nothing to show that headmasters of secondary schools often encourage their abler boys to enter training colleges the evidence is quite to the contrarythere may be at the top a certain number of students who have only just missed an open scholarship or exhibition at one of the older universities, or have failed by a few meaningless marks to secure a State scholarship or one of the major scholarships offered by their local education authority. At the other end there are in lean years some who have found it a sufficiently laborious process to obtain a school certificate within the twelve or eighteen months previous to their entering college. For that reason I doubt whether courses on the social sciences and allied subjects can at present to any considerable extent take the place of existing courses, though the latter might certainly be further integrated, and sometimes given a rather different bias. I am entirely in favour of the student learning all that he can about the relation of education to social and economic

conditions. Indeed I believe that to the man teacher, who has not the woman's innate propensity to care deeply about the young, a real enthusiasm for education often comes first from knowledge of that kind. Eventually full provision must be made for the study and experience which make that knowledge possible. If every student had spent a full two years in a sixth form after passing the school certificate examination (not necessarily working for a higher certificate), it might be possible to reduce the courses substantially, so that they were designed to give a new approach rather than to impart new matter. But, as things are, it is too often a first charge on the time and energy of a staff to see that students have an adequate knowledge of the subjects which they will be required to teach in school.

We have to remember the existence of the weaker students, when we hear talk about degrees for all teachers. The very last thing that they need after the severely examined courses of the secondary schools is to be ridden hard at fences which they can take with the utmost difficulty, if at all. We must remember their existence, too, if claims are put forward, without reference to financial conditions, for an additional continuous year of training for all teachers, irrespective of their ability. All teachers, no doubt, benefit from 'refresher' courses at various stages of their teaching career. But, if only a limited amount of money is available for the preparation of teachers after the war, it is doubtful whether an additional continuous year for every one will be the wisest way to invest it. I was deeply interested to find Mr. Jacks advocating a kind of staff college in Education, an institution of which I have often had dreams, though we might not agree in detail about its functions and constitution. (Incidentally, one value of the suggestion is that a staff college implies a general staff, which is exactly what English education hitherto has conspicuously lacked.) The entrants to such a college would presumably be thosewhatever their previous training, and in whatever type of school they had taught-who had proved by their work in the actual conditions of school life that they had the capacity and determination to pursue a further course of study with advantage to themselves and the schools. The entrants would not include those young men and women who had the capacity to be useful and conscientious practitioners and no more, nor those young women, sometimes, no doubt, of exceptional ability, who after a few years of teaching leave the profession for marriage or some other career. The college, if it were to come, would stand for quality, and the necessary expenditure would be incurred on those most capable of using it to the advantage of themselves and others.

I believe that the more we come to think of the education of all children over eleven as one, the more we shall see the need for at least three kinds of trained teacher. There will be the graduate in honours, who follows his degree course by a year of professional study. If some honours courses are modified on the lines suggested by Dr. Löwe in his Universities in Transition, so much the better. There will be the teacher who has obtained his professional qualification after a course of two years, whether that qualification is called certificate or diploma. And I believe there will be room for the teacher who has taken a course of three years leading to a pass degree in three subjects, of which Education is one, and perhaps the one that gives unity and coherence to the whole. It will be entirely to the good if they can all receive their training in colleges so closely associated that they can share some social and intellectual life. In this way intending teachers from very different homes will come to understand each other, and the academically weaker students will be stimulated by the stronger. Those considerations rather than the usual charge of segregation' seem to me to be the real argument for making the association between training colleges closer than a merely examinational' one. As to segregation', there are modern universities which largely depend for their existence upon the presence of intending teachers, and life

in some of their hostels is probably nearly as 'segregated' as in a training college. Moreover, if we are sincere in talking about teaching as a vocation', if we hope that many students will regard it as something even more than an honest job honestly to be performed, it will scarcely be inappropriate for the prospective teacher to experience for a few years a particular kind of community life not required by other students.

The

It would be irrelevant and invidious to discuss here the question whether the capacities of these young men have been put to the best use during their secondary education. Nothing is easier or more futile than to blame the secondary schools for not doing what it is virtually impossible for them to do, so long as public opinion regards secondary education primarily as a process of passing examinations and a means of social and occupational ascent. But, if we are to aim at the production of the right type of men and women, rather than of the technical expert', two characteristics of many, by no means of all, entrants to training colleges seem to me to be disquieting. First, there seems to have been little attempt to give them any coherent view of life or set of principles, even if it were a view which the restlessness of youth made them criticize or temporarily reject. religious interpretation has in many cases been just left out, and nothing coherent suggested in its place. Secondly, there is a noticeable and depressing tendency to pay attention only to those aspects of their studies which students believe to have a directly examinable value, and to be diffident, and even restive, when invited to follow lines of thought which do not lead straight to the one narrow objective. The damnable question "But is it in the syllabus ? is too often in their minds, if not on their lips. For these two weaknesses no remedy, I am convinced, is to be found in improved syllabuses and examinations and administrative apparatus. The need is for adequate leisure in which new interests can be acquired and old ones furthered, and for students to be able to experience the conversation and companionship of older people who have some kind of faith, which they openly profess, some width of experience, and cultural interests of their own-in other words for the right kind of tutorial system worked by the right kind of tutors.

A tutorial system giving opportunity for frank and informal discussion, as well as occasionally for individual tuition, is the best antidote to another element in the mental attitude of many students, which prevents them from getting the best out of their college life. I mean a certain lack of confidence, a sense of inferiority, flavoured sometimes with a downright distrust of older people in authority, which may be covered by an assumed indifference, independence, or in extreme cases aggressiveness. Unfortunately the traditional discipline of residential training colleges was too often in the past such as to intensify and exacerbate this feeling, and survivals from that discredited régime are to be found even to-day. The ordinary training college student has had, after all, a good deal to contend with in the course of his boyhood and youth. The benevolence which, no doubt, lies behind a State-aided system of schools, and scholarships, and loans is apt to be disguised by a façade of administration and personnel which may seem unsympathetic, arbitrary, and somehow 'superior', to those whom the system is in fact designed to benefit. To meet an older. and presumably better educated, person who will talk with him and not at him, who will take an obvious interest in him, and believe in the best in him, may at this stage make all the difference to a student who is uneasily conscious both of what he has lacked and of what is due to him. Better still if this can come about in a wisely and graciously planned college life in which the appreciation of right values will be instilled inevitably though imperceptibly.

In the last resort the success of any form of professional education will depend upon the tutorial staff. In a residential training college I suggest that the perfect staff would contain three elements, which need not be mutually

exclusive. There would be those who were outstanding academically, and would represent first-rate standards in some subject or assembly of subjects. There would be those who could bring to the college some specially interesting or varied experience of schools and school life. There would be those possessing special gifts for personal-or pastoral— work with students. The staff would be larger than is now customary and would include both permanent members and others' seconded' from schools for a period of service in a training college. I do not believe that because a college is preparing students for work in junior and senior schools it is necessary that all or many of its tutors should have themselves been regular members of the staff of those schools. The apprentice must learn, of course, from the master craftsman, but the right place to learn from the master craftsman is in his workshop, in this case in the school. The

training college cannot usefully attempt to do prematurely what can only be done in the first years of teaching, and will be done better when young teachers are sent to more carefully selected schools than is always the case at present.

There remains the question-are the conditions of work in training colleges, material, social, professional, such as to attract the right people to their service, or, at least, not to deter them from it? They should be among the pick of the teaching profession. There is plenty of flaccid talk about those engaged in this work holding the key positions in education. There is nothing, however, in the salaries with which they are remunerated or in the promotion which they commonly receive to indicate that this view is taken seriously by those who in their several capacities make appointments to the teaching and administrative services and have the final financial control.

DEAR T. P.,

Thank you for returning the article on The First Four Years of the Secondary Curriculum ", and also for your comments on it. Of course I was not offended by the frankness of the latter; on the contrary, I assume that you wanted to start an argument, and would like me to answer in the same spirit. So here you are.

First of all, I might have saved some cross-purposes if I had remembered to tell you that the writer of the article was brought up at a boarding school very similar to the one over which you rule; and so at least to that extent he did know what he was talking about. True, his outlook is probably coloured by a more recent picture of the curriculum in State secondary schools, a picture—you and I must remind ourselves-not of some idyllic state, but of something that is actually being done. When he attacks the overcrowding of the curriculum he certainly has in mind, for example, a junior school time-table that includes per week two periods of physical education, two of music, two of woodwork, and possibly one each of art and football or cricket. But please don't jump to a hasty " That's what I said!"; you have missed the point of his argument completely if you think he is complaining about these eight periods. In fact, he regards them as the bright spots in a dark picture.

The truth is, although it is painful for either of us to have to admit it, that he has already passed through a stage of curriculum development that we are only beginning; he is tackling another stage, and even foreshadowing a third stage. If I can prove this to you, it may suggest a reason why you should have found his language so impracticable' and remote from reality'. When I refer to the stage which contains our efforts as the first ', I am not, of course, suggesting that we are medieval or antediluvian. Endless stages' have preceded ours, and ours is merely first in the sense of being one of the most recent three. It is still therefore quite up to date, quite modern-I am not calling you an old fogy! All the same, it is a stage which has been developing for a long time; every step in it has been fought bitterly, and it has not reached its climax yet. We might describe it under a general classification as a struggle for franchise on behalf of subjects other than Latin and Greek. You will tell me that this is ancient history, that the privileges of the classics were lost a hundred years ago, and that it is beating a dead horse to bring up this point in the 1940's. But that was not a stage, but a step; the sharing of privileges with a few other favoured subjects (and what grudging favour it was!) such as mathematics, science, history, and modern languages, was but the initial movement towards the equality of curriculum-rights for all

subjects. If you are honest with yourself, you will admit that that battle is still going on at least in the type of school with which you and I are familiar. What, for example, was your attitude to the use of those eight periods I mentioned above? Do you really consider physical education as a curriculum subject at all? Yet the writer of the article in question certainly does, and that is one reason why his article makes nonsense to you. You are still fighting the battle of rights'; he has granted universal franchise and is considering a state which is the result of that concession. This is just a statement of historical fact; I am passing no judgment on the rights and wrongs of such a concession.

May I put the situation pictorially as follows: When you sit down to construct your time-table you have before you a sheet of paper with, say, thirty-two squares representing the number of periods per week available, and another sheet of paper on which are written the subjects you have for various reasons admitted to a place on the curriculum. These reasons can probably be fairly summed up under three headings: (1) educational values-though that is rather begging the question; (2) the demands of parents; (3) the availability of teachers and their demands. (I am assuming for argument sake and to avoid red herrings that exam-requirements coincide with reason 1.) There are probably eight or nine subjects on sheet 2, and your task is to fit them into the squares on sheet I in some proportion that will satisfy the various reasons for which they are there. The overcrowded curriculum' means in your case the simple fact that eight goes into thirty-two four times, and four periods a week is far too little for Latin or Greek or for any other individual subject taught on the same lines. You solve the problem by 'paring' the subject which has the least backing of reasons', or by putting a pencil through it. It is as simple as that, and you don't write articles in learned papers about it. Of course, there may be some anxious moments when you come to explain your time-table to parents or staff, but in the long run it is simply a question of fact-there just isn't time. Reason number I -educational values '—is the one that will probably give your professional conscience most trouble. If I asked you to write down on the back of sheet 2 a summary of those values, I imagine the briefest statement of them would be: (a) mental training, (b) essential knowledge-content. Consequently, if your pencil-line happened to be through Art', it would be fair to argue that you considered that art gave less mental training and contained less essential knowledge than any other single subject on the list and therefore it had to go. I hope that gives an adequate picture-outline of your (and my) methods of constructing a time-table. It

also represents very roughly Stage I of curriculum development.

Now let us look at X (the writer of the article) drawing up his time-table. He has before him the same sheet with thirty-two squares. On sheet 2 he also has a list of subjects, but they amount to, say, twelve. And his task is similar to yours, to fit these twelve into the thirty-two squares. Is the only difference then between you and him one of number, the fact that he has four more subjects to juggle with or dismiss? Is his problem of overcrowding different from yours only in degree, or is it also different in kind? Certainly a difference in kind seems to be the only explanation of the undoubted fact that, when he takes his pencil to sheet 2, he is as likely to add yet another subject as you are to cross one out. Nothing in our attitude to the curriculum could reconcile such a step with our complaints about overcrowding; even if we could talk down or override staff and parents, we would have to recast entirely our first reas n for including subjects on the curriculum-the reason I have called 'educational values'. On the whole, it is likely that X has to deal with parents and staff who are even less amenable to being overridden than ours are. But he may be a superman or a superheadmaster, in which case it still remains obvious that his educational values must be different from yours and mine.

I suggest, first of all, that he uses them differently. I pictured you above weighing the educational value of art against that of the next subject on the list; art was the lighter, it had less of the thing we call ' educational value ' therefore it had to go. In other words,' educational value is used as a sort of quantitative measurement, a standard of quantity by which we test subjects for admission to the curriculum. If logic were rigidly pursued under this principle, it would seem to follow that, if one subject alone surpassed all the others in the quantity of educational value' it contained, there would be no reason to admit any other subject. The old classicists did believe and act on some such principle. They felt that, if you went deep enough into the classics, you would find everything there. Now, X has quite a different standard for measuring subjects, or rather, since I have not yet gone into the details of his educational values, let us still say that he has a different way of using his standard. He does not weigh subject 8 against subject 7; he does not even number his subjects in descending order of values. Remember what I have said before he has conceded full rights to all subjects. Hence, he examines each subject by itself, not in comparison with others; and he looks at it to see what it can offer; he is looking for qualities rather than quantity. If it has certain qualities (and, ceteris paribus, no matter how small the quantity), he will try to devise a method of fitting it into the curriculum at all costs. It consequently becomes necessary to try to summarize those qualities, to compare his educational values' with ours.

When I said that you were not an old fogy it was not merely to palliate rude remarks ahead. I meant it. You do not, for example, hold the strict theory of mental discipline as held by the old classicists. You admit other subjects to the curriculum because you believe that different types of mental training are necessary. No doubt you believe as I unashamedly do that the best training is still to be had by those who can take it from a good classical course. But I wonder if you would go farther and say that this is due rather to the supply of good masters and to the existence of a strong tradition of teaching than to anything like a law of nature '--something inherent in the classics as such? However, the point is not important for the moment. The main thing is that you admit the desirability of a certain broadening of the curriculum. Now, twenty years ago X would have gone a good deal farther. He would have said that breadth was everything becausethere was no such thing as mental training. (The question deserves a letter of its own; here I am not trying to prove or defend anything, but to show the reason for the differences

between you and X.) But in the past two decades that contradiction has been tempered, and the most that X would say now is that the proof of mental training is so uncertain that it provides no safe principle on which to choose subjects for the curriculum. So much for the negative differences.

To formulate his positive principles shortly is not so easy. I am inclined to imagine that, whereas you think primarily of the subject and its value, his first thoughts go to the child. What does the child need to get from the curriculum? And his answer gives him his main principle: That which will give him as complete a picture of the world as he is at present capable of acquiring, and will later enable him to understand as fully as possible the world in which he must live. Obviously no one subject is going either to give an adequate picture of the world or to satisfy a child's capabilities; the tendency of such a principle will be to include more rather than less. But-and this is the important point-not more of the same thing (e.g. quantity of mental training), but more different things (i.e. different qualities). His aim is not a minimum essential training, but a maximum breadth of understanding.

You will realize that I have been indulging in simplification beyond the safety-point if this were supposed to be a systematic treatise on educational theory. Both you and X make use of many more principles than the ones with which I have credited you. But all I am concerned to prove is that there are fundamental divergences of principle which give the word 'overcrowding' different meanings in his experience and in yours. And I hope I have said enough now to show that 'overcrowding' as you understand it'too many subjects for too few periods "-is not his problem at all. His real difficulty is: Too much of each subject for too small minds "--but that needs explaining. Acting on his desire to make the curriculum represent as broad a picture of the world as possible and to satisfy as many capabilities as the child possesses, X has admitted a large number of subjects. His criterion in each case is the different contribution that each subject makes to the picture and the different line it opens up for the child. To teach these subjects he has called in specially qualified masters. Now, the specialist, as you know, has made a great contribution to the practice and theory of teaching, but he has his drawbacks. He is apt to be an enthusiast, and an enthusiast along one line at that. His own training has taken him deep into his subject, and he tends to find it difficult to teach in breadth rather than in depth. His instinct, unless he is very enlightened, is to attempt to reproduce other specialists in his subject, to make the child, as one writer has put it, an increasing fraction of a professor". The result is that his syllabus, especially in the earlier years, has become more and more detailed, and in his effort to go deep' he finds it increasingly difficult to cover the syllabus as originally outlined. How much more difficult it must be for the child who has to follow not only him but at the same time seven or eight others of his specialist colleagues !

Here then we have the setting for X's problem of overcrowding. Having deployed a platoon to advance in open order across a field, he finds each soldier digging himself in beside the near hedge, sweating over dug-outs and supports that will never be needed, and pushing slowly forward through communication trenches with little prospect of reaching the other side of the field in the time available. Or, to revert to educational terminology, the fault that has emerged in the broadening of the curriculum (Stage 2) is that subjects are being taught too slowly and are not being taken far enough. So, to remedy his overcrowding problem, X takes up his pencil just as you did, but he does not bring it into action on sheet 2. Instead, he reaches across the table to his sheaf of syllabuses. Under each subject heading he scores out much that he considers unnecessary, much that is repeated under another heading. Anything that can be justified only on some theory of mental training, any