Education Areas.

Le Chancelier Hitler
Est indigne de vivre.
Le peuple d'outre mer
Sera seul à survivre,
Du Führer allemand
Finira l'odyssée ;
Un juste châtiment
Attend la Croix Gammée.

IN N our last issue we referred to recent speeches of the President of the Board of Education and the General Secretary of the National Union of Teachers. We believe that the Government have every intention of carrying into effect the three main reforms to which Mr. Ramsbotham referred the raising of the school age to 15, without exemptions, the establishment of day continuation schools, and the inclusion in the secondary school system of all post-primary schools. The reform advocated by Sir Frederick Mander, the abolition of Part III Authorities as such, seems to be the necessary

complement to these reforms. As we said in our leading article, March, 1939, "It has long been obvious that the harmonious development of a properly graded and duly interrelated system of secondary education for all demands the elimination of the Part III authorities as such". The alternatives, as it appears to us, are either to leave to the Part III authorities the administration of infant and junior schools in their areas, or to accept the recommendation of the Economy Committee and transfer the educational powers of these authorities to counties and county boroughs. This would probably mean in effect that those Part III authorities with more than 75,000 inhabitants (the limit suggested by the Commission on Local Government) would become county boroughs, and the others would be eliminated. We hope that a fight for the preservation of the powers of the smaller authorities may be avoided, and that one or other of the alternatives we suggest may be adopted by common consent. This, however, is not enough. There is need for the establishment of regional authorities competent to deal with certain large questions which transcend the limits of the present areas of local

THE TIMES recently published a letter from a clerical correspondent saying that "some some consideration should be given to education in rural areas in relation to agriculture". This Agriculture in letter, as was pointed out by another Education. correspondent, gives the unfortunate impression that little or nothing is being done by the schools about agricultural education. Happily this is not true. Attached to the new central schools in many areas are large playing fields, some acres of which are devoted to experiments in the cultivation of the soil, closely linked with laboratory work. Many schools have their Young Farmers' Clubs which train their members in the care of stock and other duties of farmers, while in the history lesson children are now taught less about the Wars of the Roses and more about the Battle of Agriculture, less about Perkin Warbeck and Lambert Simnel and more about Coke of Norfolk and Turnip' Townshend. It would, however, be most unfortunate if the idea became prevalent that such training should be limited to rural areas. Children and adults who live in the country can scarcely fail to have some knowledge of agricultural processes, while those in urban areas are often abysmally ignorant of the place which agriculture should hold in our national life. It is unfortunate too that the letter from the clerical correspondent suggests that the fact that agriculture is a depressed occupation is mainly due to its neglect by educationists. Education can play some part in raising agriculture to the position which it should occupy, but the question is at basis an economic one, and no amount of agricultural education will bring about the desired change unless it is accompanied by an improvement in the economic status of the agricultural worker.

Juvenile Delinquency and Religious Education.

SIR PERCIVAL SHARP has made a spirited reply to the allegations sometimes brought forward about the results of the religious teaching given in council and voluntary schools respectively. appears that of the cases brought before the Liverpool Juvenile Courts during 1940, 867 were past or present pupils of Council Schools, 178 of Church of England Schools, and 1,096 of Roman Catholic Schools. Excluding Infants' Schools, the number of delinquents per 1,000 works out at 21.6 for Council Schools, 35'6 for Church of England Schools, and 45'5 for Roman Catholic Schools. "It would appear ", says Sir Percival, “that by the supreme test upon which religious training must be judged, in Liverpool the Non-provided School system does not show in any degree any better moral training than the Council School system: quite the reverse ". He goes on to mention other towns, saying that in Leeds and Newcastle-upon-Tyne the rate of delinquency in Council Schools is very slightly over half that in Nonprovided Schools, and he says that other figures in his possession all point to the same conclusion, namely, that,

if religious teaching given in the schools is to be tested by its effective bearing on the life and conduct of its recipients, the Non-provided School system does not justify the high claims which have been made on its behalf. Sir Percival adds, quite fairly, that other considerations enter in, such as the respective environments of Council and Voluntary Schools and the quality of the homes of the children, but he insists, and we agree with him, that the figures are sufficient to put an end to the slurs passed on the education given in Council Schools. No good purpose is served by unfounded allegations. It rather behoves all concerned to unite in removing, as far as possible, the causes of delinquency.

The Burnham Deadlock.

THE official statement issued on the War Bonus discussions at the meeting of the special Burnham Sub-Committee show that the Teachers' Panel made every effort to reach agreement with the opposite side. Their first proposal was that there should be a bonus of 12 per cent on the first £300 of the salaries of all teachers. This was rejected, and the Authorities' Panel made the counter-proposal that they should seek authority from their organizations to accept the Civil Service Scheme, under which no teacher earning more than £350 would benefit. The teachers could not agree to this, and made another proposal that there should be a percentage bonus embodying the principle of x per

is pointed out that the commitments in respect of which the subsistence allowance is paid do not always cease when the house is destroyed, though they may be reduced. To rule that the subsistence allowance should be reviewed in such circumstances would have been reasonable; but to say that the allowance must "strictly cease as from the date when the house is rendered unfit for habitation by reason of war damage" is so extraordinarily unreasonable that the resentment it has aroused is not surprising. The reason given is "the fact that the risk of damage to property is common to all and is not affected by evacuation"; but the evacuated teacher might have been able to limit the damage done, by incendiary bombs for example, had he been on the spot, and he might have applied to the local authority

to have his house made habitable, whereas in his absence the authority leaves his house over for later treatment. "The evacuated schoolmaster", continues the statement, "may be excused if he becomes a little ruffled when his local education authority asks him to communicate with the local authority's surveyor in order to obtain a certificate which will enable the local education authority to withhold the subsistence allowance ". Teachers are a patient race, but at the moment there are far too many indications that advantage is being taken of their sense of patriotism and public duty.

unwilling to contemplate the award of a percentage allowance to every teacher, the next suggestion was that the above proposal should be limited to salaries up to £550. This again was refused, the Authorities stating their inability to go beyond the Civil Service limit of £350, or to accept the percentage basis. The teachers then suggested an aggregate sum followed by consideration of its distribution, and made this more definite by proposing a flat rate bonus of £20 per annum on salaries up to £260, and of £15 per annum on salaries over £260 and up to £450, from an agreed date later than March 1. This was unacceptable, so nothing more could be done. One of the main points about the teachers' case is that the family man with a salary between £350 and £550 is suffering fully as much hardship as those receiving less. At the moment of writing the next step is not clear. We understand that the Civil Servants are appealing against the present limit, and the result of this appeal may improve the situation. But it must be remembered that while the Civil Servants will receive at any rate the present award if they lose their appeal, the teachers will get nothing unless they can reach agreement with the authorities. It may be found that some form of arbitration is the only way out of the impasse.

THE 'Joint Four' have called attention to the ungenerous nature of the ruling of the Board of Education that the evacuation allowances in respect of continuing commitments at home must Evacuation be discontinued as from the date when Allowances. the house in the evacuation area becomes unfit for habitation by reason of war damage. It

advance would be made if all secondary school pupils could be made into competent and independent

How Not to Teach Literature.

readers, who took pleasure in good books and yet knew when to skip, who realized they were themselves responsible for their intellectual prorelevant items of information. gress, who knew how to use libraries and to look up As a rule, says the Report, courses in literature do very little to train pupils in these desirable habits. "Good literature fails to be appreciated and enjoyed because of the analytical treatment that the best books receive in the class-room. . . . Teachers show ingenuity in torturing the subject studied by asking all kinds of questions which train the pupil in the most deliberate and minute dissection of what he has read. The result is that, whenever a pupil takes up a book, he begins to ramble in his thinking, indulging in all kinds of speculation as to the possible questions one might raise. Pupils begin to think that it requires from three to six months to read through a book. . . . Our point from the beginning of the discussion in this Journal has been that the study of set books in schools is the best method yet discovered of creating a distaste for good literature, of forming undesirable habits of reading, of warping judgment and blunting sensibility, and of achieving effects precisely opposite to those contemplated by the authors of the books studied.

* What the High Schools Ought to Teach. Report of a Special Committee. American Council on Education. Washington D.C. 1940.

ABRIEF but remarkable article appears in a recent

number of English by Mr. F. B. Stead, entitled English in the Science Sixth". He mentions different ways in which this problem is dealt English in the Science Sixth with, in one of which the boys conand elsewhere. cerned study the same books, though not so many of them, as those prescribed for boys specializing in English. Thus the science boy may find himself studying two plays of Shakespeare, and either three of the Canterbury Tales or two books of Paradise Lost. Mr. Stead is clearly of opinion that this is not the right kind of literary diet for boys whose main

have got through, only a little can be done to stimulate in children and in youths the power to take decisions and to make judgements for themselves". Surely these qualities are more valuable than the power of rep:oducing information in written replies to an examination lasting for an hour or two. The research work which has been done by Sir Philip Hartog and his colleagues into the value of examinations must have done something to shake our faith in their results. More thought and discussion on this subject are urgently needed.

only thing in its favour is an obvious economy in staffing power. He illustrates his point by various alternative suggestions which seem to us excellent, and he concludes by expressing the hope that "whatever books are read will be read without any thought of an examination in view". It did not fall within the scope of his article to say why the principles involved, one of which is that of fitting the syllabus to the boy instead of fitting the boy to the syllabus, should be applied only to the boy who happens to reach the Science Sixth. But he gives a pretty clear indication of his opinion. He admits that science in the sixth is a“ side-line", outside the chief preoccupations of the specialist teacher of English. But, he adds-may we not say rather slyly ?Ithe exploration of a side-line may not be unfruitful. There is really no knowing what the result may be. It may even be found to have some bearing on the conduct of the main-line traffic ". We hope that other contributors to English may follow up the line of thought indicated by Mr. Stead.

THE

External Examinations.

HE question of set books is only part of a much larger question-the cramping influence of external examinations upon the individuality of teachers and pupils in our secondary schools. This influence is illustrated by the large number of schools which prefer tamely to accept the set books prescribed by external examiners, instead of adopting the possible alternative of choosing for themselves the books which are best suited to the conditions of their own schools. Mr. Fisher, in his Unfinished Autobiography, speaks of the school certificate examination as this established incubus on the

young". In a recent issue we remarked on the adoption of record cards by a few education authorities in England

-Kent, Wiltshire, Sheffield-and in Scotland. These experiments deserve the close attention of educationists. We believe that an external examination, supplemented by such record cards, would be a far better indication of the real abilities of students than an external examination alone. As Brother George Every* says: "The school certificate is itself the most effective symbol of the ills of the present situation. While all secondary education is dominated by the necessity of getting through that, and all university education is education of those who

* Christian Discrimination (The Christian New-Letter Books, No. 8). (Is. 6d. net. The Sheldon Press.)

Engineering and Economics.

optimistic on the part of our universities to expect many personal benefactions. Cambridge is the recipient of a benefaction from the Institution of Civil Engineers of £1,000 per annum for five years, to foster among engineers the closer study of the economics of engineering subjects, the organization and management of engineering works and the relations of aesthetic considerations to engineering design and construction. This is a compliment to the Engineering Department. The public stands to benefit if aesthetic standards are raised in engineering work. The Institution of Civil Engineers has especially in mind the period of reconstruction and development following the present war. In addition to teaching the young engineer, research and study of these questions are to be encouraged. This evidence that university teaching of engineering appeals to the profession is gratifying, since the inclusion of the subject in the curriculum is comparatively recent and encountered some professional jealousy in the early days.

Q

UEEN ELIZABETH granted her Royal Charter to Trinity College, Dublin 350 years ago, and that famous University was founded with the co-operation of the City of Dublin. The alumni Trinity College, include some honoured names-Burke, Dublin. Goldsmith, Swift, and Berkeley-and many distinguished scholars, especially classical and mathematical. James I, by granting representation in Parliament, recognized the status of the University, but the connexion with the British Parliament was severed under Home Rule. As long ago as 1842 a chair in civil engineering was established. Dublin in this and other respects has been an academic pioneer. Women were admitted to special examinations in 1870, and degrees their local enfranchisement. Degrees were also granted were granted to Oxford and Cambridge women before to students unable to attend regular courses—“ trotters" was their popular name. In peace and war, Trinity College has placed the Empire under a great and lasting debt. Owing to the war, her seventh jubilee will be celebrated with maimed rites, but the occasion must not pass without record of our congratulations. Trinity College, Dublin can claim with St. Paul to have fought the good fight. May the College long continue to keep the academic faith.

TH

'HE title given to me as a topic for this paper is a little vague and slippery both in statement and in implication, so I must proceed at once to some attempt to clarify it. Very generously your chairman has accorded me full liberty to make what I can of it, and in accepting this freedom I trust I shall say nothing which could be construed as an abuse of such confidence.

The mere expression 'boarding school' looks simple and straightforward enough. Actually, however, it is most uncomfortably akin to those bladder' terms-like justice, freedom, democracy-upon the meaning of which all can agree so long as it is understood that every one keeps quiet about the particular concrete content with which, for his own part, he fills the empty vessel.

May I take it then that we are to discuss the boarding school mainly in the form it takes in England, a country in which it seems to have wider vogue and to carry greater prestige than in other countries? May I assume also that we are to consider it in relation to a group of schools of a particular kind-shall we call them the independent' schools?

Within these limitations we may attempt a rough definition. Viewed educationally-that is apart from other possible characters-the boarding school is then :

A school organized in the belief that effective education requires, in addition to systematic teaching, the discipline, stimuli, and opportunities that can be afforded by a free and diversified community-life, covering, so far as may be, every phase of the pupil's activities.

To this most of us would wish to add, no doubt, that the years from 13 to 19 are those during which such provision is both most effective and most desirable.

But what is it that we have defined thus roughly? Is it a principle, something with a universal validity? Or is it just a custom, a practical device of adaptation to special conditions? In other words is the boarding school derived from the nature of education itself, so that its development in England has the character of a real discovery? Or is it derived from mere accidents of circumstance, in which case it becomes no more than a convenient local practice?

Much depends on the answer, but we will postpone the consideration of that for a moment in order to look a little more closely at some variations of form of boarding school. Here I shall have to include some examples taken from outside England since they serve to show that, however well justified this type of school may be in principle, it is certainly adaptable in form to a considerable variety of circumstance. Thus, in Southern Rhodesia it is an administrative convenience brought into play for reasons that are quite as much agrarian as educational. In order to have a school of organizable size the State system there concentrates education above the age of 10 or 11 in the towns, and pays to the rural parent a boarding-grant for his children such as will make his costs no greater than those incurred by a parent actually living in the town.

Elsewhere in South Africa similar administrative devices are found. Thus, in the Cape, children of 'poor whites ' are rescued from an isolated and possibly deleterious environment, and concentrated in boarding-houses in the country towns and large villages so that they may attend a fully organized school.

Such practices must not be taken as implying a belief in the boarding principle' as such. They are rather administrative devices adopted partly to secure efficiency of teaching, and partly to retain a population on the land.

Canada has the same problem of sparsely peopled areas, and the same anxiety to prevent the lure of better schools drawing rural families away from the land. But there the State makes little or no use of the boarding school even as a device.

Another use of this form of school is to secure disciplinary segregation as in Borstal institutions and Approved schools under the Home Office. Sometimes again they may exist, as is possibly the case with some girls' schools, as a response to nothing more than the promptings of a fashion. They may even be for some a device of parental convenience, a way of off-loading undesired responsibilities.

All I wish to indicate by these examples is that the mere existence of the boarding school in some form or other cannot be taken as evidence of belief in it as a matter of principle. There is, indeed, an extreme view that this kind of school is remedial rather than fundamental, witnessing by its presence not to soundness of educational principle but to some kind of social deficiency. Either, it would be argued, it provides for specially hard cases- problem-pupils' if you like in the manner of an isolation hospital, or it is a substitute-device invented in order to achieve what the community at large ought to be doing, but because of some deficiency, is incapable of doing.

I could not myself subscribe to so extreme a view as this. But it is important to notice the element of truth in it, a matter to which we will return presently.

This hasty survey makes it possible now to offer a tentative suggestion by the developing of which we may come a little nearer to the truth of the matter.

The suggestion is this: the real determinant of the total educative process from which emerges the man or the woman is not the school but the whole society in its full historical reality. Education is above all else the distinctive function of community—its essential dynamic-and education is necessarily a community process. In simple primitive societies it can go on without requiring at all the evolution of the specialized community-organ that we call 'school'. This is employed, if at all, only on certain highly important occasions and then only in a very rudimentary form such as initiation ceremonies. Even at a much more advanced stage of development such as we find in ancient Greece, the specialized unit called school' is required only for the acquisition of certain techniques. Education in the full sense is the business of the whole society.

In complex societies, such as ours, where, for example, the load of necessary technical knowledge to be carried by each citizen is particularly heavy, we find this specialized community-organ' school' in a much more advanced stage of evolution. As one form of it we have what we must now call the full-control' school, the school which sets itself to cover every phase of the pupil's life and so is necessarily a boarding school. (Incidentally we may note that the type has a long history and was generated in forms of society very different from those of to-day. So it would be well to be prepared to meet the contention that the boarding school is quite as likely to be an atavistic survival as a late evolutionary form. The answer is to be found, of course, by a direct test in terms of present relevancy and significance.) We have seen that the type may occur in the modern world from a variety of reasons. So we must distinguish, and distinguish sharply, between the kinds of reason. These are:

(i) Accidental circumstance.

(ii) Educational principle. We do find, I think, while keeping strictly to the line of thought I am trying to follow,

-that of the progressive specialization by society of community-organs for education-that a true and distinctive educational function can be assigned to the boarding school as such. In other words, what I shall now prefer to call the ' full-control' type of school is more than a local or administrative accident. It has a value and significance of its own among the educating organs that a vital and fruitful society can produce.

What is this? I can put it this way. Every good school, limited as it necessarily is by the actualities of the society that produces it and whose needs it serves, is something more than a reproductive agent. It performs its duty not inerely in guaranteeing the continuity of a society and a culture, but also in subjecting to a critical and refining process the cultural material which is its medium. It is indeed a refinery, not merely a duplicating-plant. Kant laid down this principle long ago, and its recognition is much more vital to the health and maintenance of a democratic order than is generally realized.

Is not this peculiarly difficult and even dangerous function of the school almost cruelly important and necessary to-day? Was there ever an order of life, a social condition, a surrounding medium of culture which so much needs the refining process as does this of our own time in its impact on the young? If this means that school-mastering is to become a dangerous trade we can welcome the fact and say with all our hearts: "So it ought to be."

You will see now where I find a distinctive and highly important function for what I have called the full-control' school, provided always that it is organized and carried on as such with full educational intent and is not just an accident of circumstance.

A school that can establish control over the lives of its pupils as completely and effectively as may be, if it operates in favourable circumstances and is wisely directed, may discharge the important function that we will call intensification. That is, it can carry the refining process to a higher point of intensity while, at the same time, bringing a wider range of the pupil's thought and activity under its influence. I should imagine that the good boarding school which knows its job will be peculiarly alive to this duty in a time like the present, when so much that is dubious, even false and spurious, in the surrounding world needs its purifying touch.

But we must guard against misconceptions. There have been times in history when the full-control type of school was a beleaguered fortress of culture in an alien and hostile world. We should be misjudging both ourselves and our age if we thought that this was such a time. If the school, as I suggest, is rather a refinery, then its supply of the unrefined material must come into it with some freedom. At both ends, as it were, intake and output, it must be in living contact with the whole life of the society whose needs it serves.

Critics of the English public school are ready to charge it with at least three weaknesses on this head. They say, first, that it is in contact, organically and directly, only with a part of its related society; with the rest only indirectly, and as some say, rather ignorantly and blindly. Secondly, that, while it handles firmly and with some success many of the impurities of the common life which it refines, it allows others, equally deleterious, to operate freely, either because it does not notice them or because a firm handling of them would be prejudicial to the solid interests of its peculiar social position. Thirdly, that its pupils suffer from a certain under-exposure, school regimen and the good fortune of social position interposing, it is claimed, a comfortable protective screen between boys and the harsher, less pleasant things of this world. Some critics will add that the weakness is made worse when a school is under the illusion that exposure is more real and direct than it actually is.

I am not concerned here to assess the justice of these criticisms. My object at the moment is only to insist that there must be what I call' exposure' as between school and

world, and that the nature of it makes a deal of difference. This implies, of course, that a school which is doing its job will be working with a thought-out social philosophy relevant to its needs.

In view of what follows a little later I should like to mention that there is another aspect of these conceptions of 'refining' and 'exposure' which is likely to become increasingly important in the years that lie ahead. But I can discuss it more appropriately after raising the question of the future of the boarding school (or 'full-control' school). All these preliminaries have been necessary in order that that central question might be raised in what I hope will prove a helpful perspective. To that question we will now turn.

It will make for clarity if we discuss it in two quite distinct forms. First we will consider it in relation to the particular kind of English school in which this audience is interested, and then more widely in relation to the working of what I have called the full-control' technique in the future. This second case involves the possibility of much wider application of the full-control' idea in ways that do not necessarily demand the boarding school.

To take then the first case. I know well that the expressions public school' and 'boarding school' cannot be precisely equated. But it will be agreed, I think, that if there were no boarding schools there would be no public schools as we know them. Hence it will be substantially correct in this connexion to take the future of the boarding school as involving the future of the other. If that is accepted I can now state the conviction which, in my view, governs the whole prospect. It is quite simply this: that the public schools will save themselves by playing their part -a great part-in the saving of England. There is a preeminence awaiting them in shaping the destiny of this country rather different from and much greater than that which they have enjoyed in the past. It is impossible here to expound this thesis in detail. I can do no more than indicate, amid so much that is unpredictable, two great national services in which the schools are called upon to play a major part.

The first is one which may need some little explanation. It involves the adjustment and development of tradition in the interest of preserving the tradition itself. I am convinced that in the future, both in our education and in other fields of national policy, we shall have to make much more use of clear-cut rational criteria than we have done in the past. We cannot escape the necessity, I am sure. Hence much will depend on the manner in which such criteria are formulated and especially upon the source from which they are derived. Is not that source precisely the tradition itself if, on the one hand, we are to preserve continuity in strange and novel circumstances, and on the other hand to adapt the tradition itself to new and wider fields?

The task of rationalization will not be wholly congenial, running, as it does, somewhat against the historical grain. Moreover it will involve some purging of excrescences and provincialisms, and it will be hard to let these go even when we recognize them as the non-essentials they are. But rational criteria of a relevant and applicable kind we must have a clear philosophy or theory' of education, if you like and I am convinced we can get all we need by examination and restatement of the tradition itself.

Will you allow me here a personal word in order to let me say that I know this is so since I have seen it happen? Some part of my working life has been spent amid education in two widely differing Dominions. In both, what do you find if not the English tradition re-edited as it were? The emphasis on the various parts is distributed somewhat differently from what you find in England: some elements of it have reached their present home and form by devious routes (thus features that are called Scottish often turn out to be Puritan English), and the social implications of the tradition will be found to have undergone considerable