flow. He envisaged a place where foreign art would be seen, where students as well as the general public would be made alive to what was happening abroad, and where local artists and craftsmen would have a real chance of demonstrating the contribution Scotland is capable of making. Mr. Cursiter, by means of the National Gallery, is performing in these dark days a service of signal merit. He has had inter-allied exhibitions, R.A.F. shows, several exhibitions of children's drawings and paintings, lunch-time music, evening concerts illustrating the contribution made by various countries now allied to Britain in her struggle, and has made of the Gallery something very far different, in his own words, from a sort of graveyard for pictures where the visitor tip-toed about so as not to waken the attendants".

President Beneš of Czechoslovakia and Sir Malcolm Robertson, chairman of the British Council, performed the opening ceremony on November 5 of the Scottish-Czechoslovak House, at 34 Lauder Road, Edinburgh. The house,

which has been established as a social and cultural centre for the many Czechoslovak civilians, soldiers, and airmen in Scotland, owes its foundation to the initiative of the Czechoslovak Government through their Edinburgh representative, Dr. L. Soukub, and the assistance of the British Council through their Scottish Regional Officer, Mr. H. Harvey Wood. After the opening, President and Madame Beneš attended a luncheon given in their honour by the British Council, at which Sir Malcolm Robertson spoke of the special respect in which Czechoslovakia and her President are held by the British people, not only for their tradition of freedom, but also for the splendid fight which they are at present waging against the German oppressors. In reply, President Beneš referred to the "noble work" of the British Council in establishing the Scottish-Czechoslovak House and the Czechoslovak Institute in London, and added that the Czechoslovak Government intend to establish a British national centre in Prague as soon as victory is achieved.

CORRECTION OF HOMEWORK SIR, I should like to support the views of Sir Philip Hartog, as expressed in the letter in your November issue, in which he points out the ineffectiveness of “red-ink corrections and suggests an investigation on the subject. My cwn experience is similar to Sir Philip's. When it was my official duty to inspect schools in London, I often took the opportunity of looking at the pupils' exercises in composition and taking steps to discover what benefit had accrued from the teachers' corrections; and the conclusion I came to was that the benefit was almost nil. The average pupil apparently looked at the final mark and ignored the rest. My sympathy went with the teachers who had spent so many dreary hours on a dismal task and had achieved so little. To be reasonably effective their corrections should be pushed further : they should be followed up. But even so the drudgery of marking would remain-nay, would be augmented. All that may, however, perhaps be avoided by some such method as that indicated by Sir Philip in his letter. My own opinion is that much of the burden may safely be shifted from the teachers to the pupils. For I am inclined to think that many of the blunders which are pointed out to the pupils could very well be discovered by the pupils themselves; that is, if they are given an opportunity of revising their exercises before handing them in. Nay more, they should come to regard careful revision as an essential part of the exercise. The exercise sent in is, as a rule, the first draft. Its main merit is its neatness. There are neither scorings nor interpolations. My point is that we should encourage scorings and interpolations. We should encourage self-criticism and place a premium on second thoughts. May I then suggest that part of the proposed investigation should be directed towards finding out to what extent a pupil can himself improve on his first draft? Chute, Nr. Andover, Hants.

P. B. BALLARD.

PROVISION OF WAR-TIME NURSERIES SIR,-It has come to the point when we as a great nation have got seriously to ask ourselves why we have proved so inadequate in arranging for the health, safety, and happiness of our babies and little children in war time; why we have failed to give their mothers the necessary confidence in our arrangements so that they may be content to leave the children to others while they do work to help end the war and so secure a happy and peaceful world in which their children may grow up.

The answer to this question is short and certainly unpalatable. The cause is selfishness-selfishness in high places in the form of competition between government

departments, and between voluntary organizations. Each and all will say, but we have worked and planned, we have co-operated". All this is true, but in every case there is competition for power, jealousy of place: let us, our Ministry or our Society, be the leader in this war-time effort; we are the people ". It is not said, perhaps not even thought, but to the onlooker it lurks behind all action, and delays it.

Selfishness too in the upper-middle class who would rather care for their own immediate comfort than make happy, safe homes in the country for the children and brothers and sisters of their own countrymen and countrywomen who are working, fighting, dying, to make a safe place for others to live in.

Selfishness too of local authorities who are happy in their own locality, ordered to meet the needs of their particular citizens, and cannot take the wider view, except in a grudging spirit, nor extend their organization to meet efficiently the crying need of the children of workers and of bombed-out parents.

The English Government, true to form, have up to date appealed to voluntary effort. In individual cases this has been forthcoming, but the impetus, the initial effort, has so often been checked through lack of a direct lead, through ever-fluctuating decisions, that it has been hard to keep up the zeal with which the first efforts were made.

It is clear now that, if anything is to be done before it is too late, compulsory measures must be adopted and a special committee established with full powers to work out a scheme and to put it into operation in the shortest possible time.

In looking deeply into the cause of this second great war and the inevitable stride toward it after the Armistice in 1918, England has rightly blamed herself for want of foresight, for love of selfish ease, and for turning a deaf ear to her prophets.

Vol

Certain local education authorities have made the provision of nursery schools part of their programme. untary nursery organizations also, such as that at Tyneside, have flowered and continue to do so. Given a long enough peace, the torch might have been handed on from one to another till the goal was reached, but the pauses caused by hesitation in taking up the torch would not have made a good team for the torch race and the rate of the individual runners would have been amazingly different.

The correspondence in The Times on the matter of wartime nurseries has been interesting to follow and no doubt, besides the ordinary man, those in power over these matters have read the words of their critics.

(Continued on page 534)

Kenneth Lindsay's letter of November I overtops all others in importance because he clears the argument of all side issues, of all detail of procedure and gets down to the bare bones of an essential policy. It is (under present arrangements) no one person's whole-time job to see that quick and authoritative decisions on accommodation, equipment, and staffing are taken both at the centre and in the localities." "I am more than ever convinced that the Government has made a wrong decision, and that only a complete reversal will meet the needs." The Board, directors of education, teachers, and bona fide bodies like the Nursery School Association are all familiar with the job. Naturally they need co-operation from doctors, nurses, and those who supply food, but unity of direction is essential." To secure this object one person must be placed in charge, preferably a woman. A new department should be added to the Board just as Youth Service and C.E.M.A. were added eighteen months ago. The responsible person should have a small expert advisory council, serviced by carefully selected civil servants. These names could be agreed within twenty-four hours. Lastly, every education authority should reproduce this simple framework within its own county or borough, enlisting the appropriate voluntary helpers and securing the 100 per cent grant."

"

He is asking for a unified control; for a new department in the Board of Education under the leadership of a woman who has the personality and drive of a Lord Beaverbrook, and the power to call in experts in all the necessary branches of knowledge to her aid. The material is all there ready to her hand and, if the appointment is made without prejudice, without precedent, without favour, without any relation to established official procedure, i.e. if the War Cabinet goes straight for the person born for the job, the decks will soon be cleared, the crew organized and the ship carry its valuable cargo into a sunlit port.

A CORRESPONDENT.

THE CHURCHES AND THE CHILDREN SIR,-I was most interested to read in The Journal of Education for October Mr. Raymont's letter on the teaching of religion. He suggests in it an approach to the matter which deserves very careful examination. Great stress has been laid recently on the need for teachers to teach, not merely their subject, but children: that is to say, over and above the obvious requisite of exact and expert knowledge of his subject, the teacher must possess an understanding of the minds of the children he teaches. The verb to teach', in English as in Latin, takes two direct objects, and it is fatal to neglect either of them.

In the teaching of religion this need for understanding the child is even greater in so far as the aim of religious education is not so much to impart knowledge as to communicate an attitude to life; its aim lies in the realm of character rather than that of intellect. But this surely patent fact has not yet been adequately grasped in theory nor applied in practice. Those who are responsible for religious instruction in schools do not yet seem fully to have realized the necessity for approaching the child's mind on its own level of understanding.

Of course, one is here faced with a dilemma which it is by no means easy to solve. Should one, like many religious bodies and with the approval of so great a mind as Plato's, get the child young' and instil into its mind a philosophy of life which, though incomprehensible to it at the time, will remain a guiding force in its life ever after? Or should one follow the principle of freedom in religion, maintaining that sincere and deliberate choice is more valuable than a prompted acceptance, and leaving the child to make a decision which is genuinely its own? The answer is not easy, especially for those who are convinced that a religious or, more particularly, a Christian, attitude to life is of supreme importance. My own view is that the former method smacks too much of Nazism, and that the choice

must be free and unprompted even though this involves greater risk (albeit a risk which God Himself thought fit to take).

It seems to me, therefore, that there are definite limits to the range of religious instruction at any age up to the end of adolescence, and that the teacher's duty is to discover these limits and work to the utmost of his ability within them. I should like, very tentatively, to make the following suggestions.

Religious instruction should be more fully adapted at all ages to the capacity of the child's understanding. There are few teachers who do not accept this in principle, and many are applying it in practice. The Christian experience is something which only a mind approaching maturity can begin to grasp. Most children are too self-centred, too selfconfident, too eager to express themselves, to accept, for instance, the Christian doctrine of love. Again, it is only in later adolescence that the power of comprehending abstract ideas is sufficiently developed for the child to appreciate points of doctrine. To try to force on children conceptions for which they are not ready may only increase the attitude of rebellion through which they normally pass during a part of adolescence, and so result in permanent hostility to religion; or it may create the impression that religion is something difficult and abstruse, something unrelated to every-day life. But meet the child always on his own level of mind and feeling, encourage in him those moral qualities which he can readily appreciate, and you will have sound foundations for further building. Until the age of 17 or 18, therefore, the main aims of religious instruction should be:

1. The adaptation of the growing child to his environment-his school-mates, the larger society of town, country, humanity, the universe, the achievements of the human spirit in the arts. This will demand not only a very thorough understanding of the individual child and of psychology (particularly adolescent psychology), but also the ability on the teacher's part to answer for the child a good many difficult questions.

2. The formation in the child of certain primary moral habits such as honesty, justice, reasonableness, tolerance, discipline, which, whatever the religion the child may later adopt, are essential for any ordered life in a community.

3. To give the child a knowledge of the principal world religions and of the function of religion in life, stressing Christianity partly because of its superiority in number of (nominal) adherents, and partly because it is the national religion of this country and is inextricably woven into its history and traditions. Also to give the child a clear impression of the personality of Christ in all its manifold fascination, and of His influence on the course of human history.

4. To encourage the child to think about the problems of human destiny-of life and death and what comes after. Most children are interested in such problems at some time during adolescence, and they should be given opportunity to discuss them and think them out. If these aims are successfully accomplished, a solid foundation will have been laid for the finer superstructure of Christian belief and life.

It is more important to encourage in children a religious attitude to life than to instil doctrine. Such an attitude

implies, beyond the acceptance of such primary virtues as I have suggested, creativeness, a sense of the sacredness of labour and of natural resources, efficiency, and order. Once given such an attitude, doctrine will slide into place without the usual friction.

School services should be better adapted to the needs of children. Sermons above the heads of children are far too

frequent and do more harm than good. It follows that, where in a school there is a great age range, separate services should be arranged for seniors and juniors.

(Continued on page 536)

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Very serious consideration should be given to the question of confirmation. Is 14 or 15 too low an age? Can children of that age realize the implications of confirmation or make a considered choice for Christianity? Or is it fair even to ask them to make such a choice at that age?

Perhaps I shall be accused of wishing to substitute for Christianity a vague humanism-cum-utilitarianism. But that is not my intention at all. I am fully convinced that without the knowledge of God as revealed in Jesus Christ the rising generation will not be able to remake the world, and that somehow children must be brought to that knowledge. But I do believe it is harmful to the cause of true religion to try to force on children, at whatever age, conceptions which they are not yet capable of grasping, and that, given a sound substructure of morality and integration, the Christian superstructure can be more easily and more permanently built.

One last word-religion is caught not taught, as we are so often told. If members of the Church, clerical and lay, were to live out Christ's teaching to the full, there would be less need in schools for the teaching of Christian doctrine. St. George's School, F. W. GARFORTH.

Harpenden.

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RELIGIOUS EDUCATION

SIR,-In your October number a letter from Mr. J. Stewart Cook on Religious Education" seems to me to display a nineteenth-century outlook. One is tempted to disagree with all his points automatically, even the references to 'Physics' and 'Literature '.

Two articles in your September issue occasioned Mr. Cook's letter. In that same issue were letters continuing a discussion on what should be taught under the heading of 'Literature', showing that everybody is not agreed about the matter, nor ever will be. In all staff-rooms there is constant discussion about the content of the course in different subjects, and the varieties of opinion which exist among those of us who, as teachers, desire to see Scripture satisfactorily and thoroughly treated in the class-room, are no more than similar differences in the other subjects.

At the same time I willingly admit and deplore that those who profess and call themselves Christian have so often given to others the entirely erroneous impression that the things which divide Christians are more important than those which unite. In reality the reverse is the truth, and never more true than to-day.

"

I should like to take time to disagree with the implications behind the term 'secular' State, as if the State were an arbiter between different religions. I should also like to develop a flat contradiction of the statement that I the growing knowledge of science, of Biblical scholarship and historical investigation and cultural honesty and candour all combine to question the very fundamentals of the Christian faith". My own reading of all these matters brings me to quite the reverse conclusion. But I will end by drawing your correspondent's attention to your notes on Christian Education on page 367 of that same September issue. The fundamental urgency behind all this discussion is there clearly stated. FREDERICK JEFFERY.

Methodist College, Belfast.

NATIONAL SCHOOL-LEAVING CERTIFICATE SIR, Mr. Barnard's excellent article in the October number of The Journal on "The Central or Modern School" reminds us of the desirability of raising the school-leaving age to 16, and the achievement of equal status for all postprimary schools both in the eyes of the public and the educational profession.

I suggest that every child who satisfactorily completes a course in a post-primary school should receive a National School Leaving Certificate stating the courses he or she has successfully followed and perhaps the degree of success attained. This certificate should be identical in form

THE EXTENSION OF BOARDING-SCHOOL
EDUCATION

SIR,-In your November number, on page 472, I am quoted as having said that "after the war, service camps should be converted into public schools so as to extend more widely the benefits of public school education ". This was the way in which one or two newspapers incorrectly reported what I said. Actually, throughout my speech I used the words I residential schools ".

The Western Daily Press on Tuesday, September 16, gave correctly the gist of what I said in this paragraph :

"

Stressing the need for more residential schools, Mr. Hallward suggested that after the war the R.A.F. camps, Army O.C.T.U. establishments, and others like them, could be well utilized as the basis of the new form of education." You will note that I spoke of a "new form of education ", and did not say that the new residential schools should be founded on the exact lines of the present public schools. I agree with you in thinking that the whole matter wants very careful consideration. B. L. HALLWARD. Clifton College,

Erdiston, Bude.

PUBLIC AND SECONDARY SCHOOLS SIR, Before very long, as a part of post-war reconstruction, it will be necessary to consider very carefully the reorganization of our system of secondary education. At the present time it is most important that no steps should be taken, in an attempt to meet immediate difficulties, which will make this task more complicated.

There is one immediate difficulty which has been advertised very widely during the past year or so. A number of the less wealthy (may I say minor ?) public schools have been financially embarrassed. There has been a movement to meet this by giving them State aid on specially privileged terms. We already have three grades of State-aided secondary schools, and there is a serious attempt to make a fourth. I wish most emphatically to protest against any proposal of this kind.

If any independent school requires State aid the procedure is very simple. They can apply to the local education authority to become an aided school. Alternatively they can apply to the Board of Education for the direct grant. A considerable number of public schools of good standing, which I have no space to name individually, are to be found in both these categories. It is therefore very difficult to understand what claim any school now in financial difficulties can reasonably make to receive different treatment, or what educational advantage is likely to arise from this procedure. I suggest that such schools willingly take their place alongside those which have already come into the State system on the ordinary terms. The proposal to form a special class is a more or less disguised attempt to institute a new class privilege, and I trust all interested in education will see it in that light, and will oppose it absolutely. What is now needed is not the institution of new class privileges, but the abolition of those that exist.

I trust it will not be necessary to elaborate this further. It is to be hoped that this agitation will die down, and that wiser counsels will prevail. The number of those who will be able to send their sons to special independent schools will undoubtedly be decreased by the inevitable impoverish