commercial work. The Army Educational Corps of the Northern Command had shown very commendable interest in the matter, but the Treasury had displayed lethargy, parsimoniousness, and singular lack of vision. The chief difficulty was that of transport. Employers and authorities regularly paid the fares of students, but the War Office would not do so. Nor had it given any ruling which would enable soldiers to obtain text-books.

So the position was that a large number of soldiers

wished to take courses which would equip them to be more efficient soldiers and prepare them for return to civilian occupations, but they were unable to do so because the War Office would not overcome certain difficulties. Early attention to this matter is a prime necessity.

AS a nation we cannot boast that looking ahead is one

Planning.

of our gifts, and, indeed, we make no such claim. We have rather been apt to regard with complacency our alleged gift of muddling-through, which in practice often means leaving things to people for whom immediate profit is the sole motive to action. We are glad to see signs of a reversal of this policy, if policy it can be called. One of them is the memorandum recently forwarded to the Prime Minister by the 1940 Council, formed under the chairmanship of Lord Balfour of Burleigh to promote the planning of social environment. The Council recall the unanimous conclusion of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population, that modern industrial and urban life requires the setting up of a national body for broad purposes of a town and country planning policy. Only so, say the Council,

"can we hope to eliminate the social and economic crises

which have often threatened our prosperity in the past, and open the way to a full community life for the largest possible proportion of the people ". Recent experiences of evacuation have thrown a flood of light upon the dark places of social muddle. We hope that Lord Reith will become an indirect benefactor of children, as well as a direct benefactor of the adult population.

Scottish Leaving Certificate.

normal form of examination based on papers set nationally and revised by examiners selected by the Department themselves. It is safe to say that the Department will not yield to these demands. They state definitely that the Leaving Certificate is to be regarded primarily as attesting the successful conclusion of a five-year course of post-primary education, and only secondarily as a passport to the Universities and the professions. They have given, and will continue to give, private information to the Universities' Entrance Board and similar bodies on the performance of individual candidates, but they do not intend to place upon this war-time Leaving Certificate a record of the subjects in which the candidate passed. They hold that to do so in present circumstances would tend to induce hardship since what

was regarded as a pass by one panel might not be so regarded by another. The General Council of Glasgow University has called for a return to the normal certificate that of Edinburgh University, on the other hand, has issued a statement expressing its opinion that the emergency regulations have worked, on the whole, satisfactorily.

Evacuation Camps in Scotland.

PARENTS are not using to the full the accommodation provided by way of evacuation camps of which there are five in Scotland, two for the Edinburgh district, two for Glasgow, and one for Dundee. A short time ago the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, Mr. J. Westwood, visited one of the Edinburgh camps which was built to accommodate 300 pupils, but, at the date of his visit, was housing only half that number. Mr. Westwood said that there was a lot of talk about building more and more camps, but it was useless to argue in favour of more camps unless full advantage was taken of those already in existence. In the Edinburgh camp which he visited the staff consists of ten teachers, a headmaster, a housekeeper, and a nurse. doctor visits the camp daily. It will be recalled that, while the camps are at present being used for evacuation purposes, their main objects were two, viz., to take boys and girls for a period out of poor quarters of the cities into an atmosphere where a healthy life might be led and sound habits formed, and to make provision for youth organizations so that, under favourable auspices, physical training and recreational work might be carried

out.

Sir

A

AMEMORIAL to Sir Owen Edwards, one of the greatest figures in the history of education in Wales, was unveiled quite recently in Llanuwchllyn, in Merionethshire. Sir Owen was of the breed of Tom Ellis, Lloyd George, and Owen Edwards. others in the famous band of young Welshmen who, at the end of last century, began to bring to Wales something of a sense of direction. Tom Ellis and Lloyd George brought leadership in politics and directed the attention of Wales to Parliament as the instrument for the removal of social injustice. Young Welshmen began to turn their minds from business to politics. But for Sir Owen there was another path. His field of action was the class-room, his source of inspiration the study and the Welsh countryside. A distinguished historian, he became a writer of great lucidity and appeal

especially in the Welsh language. For many years he sustained almost alone the burden of running one of the few Welsh periodicals of standing-Cymru. Through this he came to perceive that what he conceived to be the tradition, the spirit, the mission of Wales would be irretrievably lost if the language of Wales were to die, and so from the occasional writer he became the passionate propagandist for the survival of the language. With wisdom unusual even in a Government Department, the new Welsh Department of the Board of Education, established about 1906, selected him for the new post of Chief Inspector of Schools for Wales.

IT

T is probably unnecessary to-day to argue the case for the training of all teachers. A quarter of a century ago that case would have needed a good deal of argument, but to-day, except in a few die-hard circles, it is commonly accepted, and most thoughtful men and women would agree that, as we do not hand over the bodies of our children to the 'born' but untrained doctor, so we should not hand over their minds and immortal souls to the 'born' but untrained teacher (even if there were enough of the latter to go round). But, though this case is commonly accepted, it is not yet generally acted upon-either by parents or by leading authorities in education. Parents, it is true, often have no choice in the matter, and it may well be that the only school within reach of their homes and their purses has an untrained staff. Headmasters, headmistresses, and other educational authorities can do more, and the cause of the trained teacher needs their practical support. At present that support is not forthcoming, and untrained teachers (if that is not a contradiction in terms) are being appointed to important posts, for a variety of reasons. There is the deep-seated and long-established suspicion of the content of a training course, as something quite out of touch with reality: there is bitter experience of some of the products of such a course-men and women knowing everything and knowing nothing, full of a half-baked psychology and a tough and ill-digested methodology, skilled technicians but defective human beings: there is an uneasy feeling that many of the students in university training departments are those who have not distinguished themselves in their undergraduate careers and are seeking a diploma as a makeweight for the lack of other qualifications, and that the material is, therefore, poor: there is the fact that many of those who are now at the top of the tree in the teaching world are themselves untrained there is the apparent efficiency with which many untrained teachers do their work-examination results are satisfactory, discipline is maintained, matches are won, and the question whether educationally this is good enough, and whether we are not too easily satisfied with a low standard, is never raised. These are some of the reasons why many influential teachers, while paying lip-service to training, take little notice of it in making their appointments. It is unfortunate and damaging to the cause of training, that a trained teacher in a primary school still earns less than an untrained teacher in a secondary school. The ideal is that in this matter the profession should be unified and no teacher should be appointed to any school, public, secondary or primary, without training, and, if headmasters and headmistresses (particularly of public and secondary schools) would adopt this as a principle, they would, I believe, be doing one of the most signal services to education that has been done for many years. How is this ideal to be realized? Mainly by improvements in the training colleges and training departments. We may usefully consider some weaknesses in the present position and some possible reforms.

I would suggest in the first place that the very phrase 'The Training of Teachers', which we have accepted as descriptive of our work, has much to answer for. It suggests a two-fold and most undesirable limitation, and, though it may have been appropriate at one time, it is appropriate no longer. The word training' suggests something narrow, purely technical, and specific: we think of training an athlete for a race, or a pet dog to do its tricks and there is at least a suggestion that the trained teacher has mastered the bag of tricks laid up in the training college or training department. Nothing, of course, is further from the truth. 'Teacher' again bears too limited a connotation: it smacks of the dominie's desk and the ex cathedra attitude, and it ignores the much more important part of the teacher's

work which is done outside the class-room and effected by the elusive influence of personality on personality. To-day it is not teachers whom we wish to train, so much as educationists whom we wish to prepare. We have learnt in our schools that education is more than teaching, but we have not yet learnt the lesson in our training institutions: we are training for the schools of a generation ago when the curriculum was limited to the three R's (and their equivalents), teaching was largely a matter of technique which could be taught there is a 'methodology' of teaching, but there is no 'methodology' of education. It was undoubtedly easier to train a teacher when his task was to make a literate people: it is much more difficult now that his task is to make a cultured people.* For this task the possession of a broad culture in himself is the first essential, but the curriculum of many training colleges and departments is so dependent on the earlier and out-of-date conception of training that, amid a welter of professional subjects and examinations, little time is left for the acquisition of that general culture and philosophy of life which is so crying a need.

The criticism that training courses are "too theoretical " probably fails to express the real objection of the critic : what he probably means is that the theory is wrong. "To recommend the separation of practice from theory," said James Mill in his article on Education, "is simply to recommend bad practice": and there is a good deal of bad practice in our schools for this reason. But we must know what we mean by the "theory of education ", and we have been remarkably uncertain and vague. It has most commonly been identified with psychology in some form, and a special branch of psychology has been invented, Educational Psychology, to fill the gap in the syllabus. But the theory of education is not psychology, though it inevitably makes some use of this science'. It is most clearly seen if we study some educational system constructed on paper and built up from fundamental principles: our own educational system is a haphazard growth and has no theoretical basis -we shall search in vain there but the system outlined by Plato in the Republic (and to a lesser degree the schemes of Locke or Rousseau or Herbert Spencer or other great thinkers) is the expression of a theory throughout we are recalled in studying Plato to first principles and first questions those questions which every teacher ought to ask and very few do ask: and here we have a theory of education which will serve as a valuable starting-point for theoretical discussion and for practical testing. The prescription of such a text would have the additional advantage of bringing the study of theory within a manageable compass.

I have said that theory involves psychology: Plato's scheme, like any intelligible scheme, is built on a psychological basis. But psychology is as fascinating as it is inexact, and easily assumes dangerous proportions in a training course. Advanced and technical psychology is certainly not needed. But every effective teacher should be something of a psychologist for two reasons: in the first place, he will quickly find that it is not Latin or Mathematics that he will be teaching, but John; his reaction to the inevitable discovery that John doesn't want to learn Latin, will be to shift his attention from his subject to his pupil, and to study John, and it will help him if he has done something along these lines already, and learnt not only to know something about children, but also to treat them as children and not as adults in embryo (one of our most besetting sins) and in the second place, education is much more an affair of the interaction of personalities than of

*See an article by Dr. H. G. Stead in The New Era in Home and School, September-October, 1940.

technical skill, and the teacher in training should be master of enough psychology to make himself as fully developed and as effective a personality as he can be. The psychology here involved is comparatively elementary, and at this stage I should go no farther at a later stage, after some practical experience of teaching, the time may be ripe for something more advanced.

But, if a training course must have this psychological basis, it must also have a social basis. The teacher needs to be at home, not only in the fairyland of childhood, but also in the matter-of-fact world of society and it is perhaps here that he most frequently fails, and his failure can most frequently be put down to his training. One of the most urgent tasks in the training of teachers is to enlarge the world in which so many teachers grow up and to break the vicious circles in which so many move. The segregation of prospective teachers in training colleges is a highly unfortunate feature in the situation: these constitute a society of their own, and their contacts with the larger society which they will eventually serve are limited and infrequent. The vicious circle of the elementary school -secondary school-training college (largely staffed by the elementary school)-and so back to the elementary school, is paralleled by the equally vicious circle-preparatory school-public school-university-and so back to the public school: and these circles never intersect. Two separate societies are formed, of men and women engaged in the same task but ignorant of each other's work and outside, and largely apart from them, is the great society for which they exist. Close association of every training college with a university would go some way to remedy the first of these defects, and a scheme whereby teachers for all types of school were trained together would lessen the second. By 'close' association I mean more than a mere examinational' association; each training college should form an integral part of a university, sharing in its life and enjoying the stimulus of its companionships: such association, in addition to the intellectual and spiritual enlargements it would ensure, would have valuable by-products in raising the standard for admission to the training colleges, and thus reducing the time spent on continued academic education (to the detriment of professional training), and also in giving to the teacher's certificate something of the status of a university degree. (My own view is that every teacher should take a degree course before professional training, but perhaps that is at the moment Utopian.) To train all teachers together for the greater part of the course (with groups specializing for primary, secondary, technical schools, &c.) would be perfectly possible, and would go far to break down the barriers between the various branches of the profession. An important element in this common course should be a thorough study of the present national system of education (including those schools which are outside the system), with enough history to understand it : this would be a much more valuable subject than the history of education which tends to become purely academic. The practical part of this study should be direct contact with as many different types of schools as possible, and with all those other institutions (Local Education Authorities, Boys' and Girls' Clubs, Juvenile Instruction Centres, Juvenile Advisory Committees, After-Care Committees, Youth Committees, Scouts and Guides) which have to do with the welfare and instruction of boys and girls. This, in itself, would serve as a valuable introduction to the great society, and would have the effect of protecting the young teacher against isolationism and giving him a sense of sharing in a widespread co-operative enterprise for the service of the community. But we should go farther than this. The educational services are only one aspect of that society, which is the social heritage of every child and for which it is the teacher's business to prepare him. I fully concur with the suggestion made by Miss Catherine Fletcher in a recent article* that the sound approach to Society for the student

* The New Era in Home and School, September-October, 1940.

in training is through the study (together with first-hand experience) of civic and public services, food supplies, factories, communications, local councils, amusements, church-work, and all the other communal activities of the district and that this study should take the place of such subjects as history, geography, general science, the history of education, and others, which commonly form part of the training college curriculum: indeed, a considerable part of methodology might with advantage be sacrificed to this more vital need.

One of the chief advantages of a training course should be the opportunity it affords for thinking about teaching. "Think what you are doing" is a very common and a very salutary piece of advice; but the young teacher has very little time for thinking what he is doing, his time is all taken up with the doing, and he is too busy teaching to be able to think about education. The time must be given him while he is training, and most courses neither give the time nor the material. The material may be partly provided in the kind of philosophical studies which I have already recommended, and the time may be stolen from lectures and the study of specific subjects (we tend to become dangerously subject-ridden), and devoted instead to discussing, in quite small groups, the overruling questions, "What is it all for? What is the sense of it? What is the ultimate objective?" The answers to these questions will be found, and our teachers will be enabled to see life steadily and see it whole, only if some synthesizing force can be supplied to bind together the analytical welter of trainingcourse studies. These at present form a patchwork quilt; they should form a patterned tapestry. The teacher trained in patchwork will be a patchwork teacher, and his pupils will grow up with a patchwork conception of life. The tapestry-trained teacher will weave a tapestry out of his school-life, and will see that as only part of a wider tapestry woven by humanity: and his pupils will find that life makes sense. The golden thread has sometimes been found in conceptions of citizenship, or the development of the individual, or self-realization; but none of these conceptions is adequate. The only real synthesis is to be found in a religious view of life and in a Christian philosophy of education. I should not hesitate to make the exposition of such a philosophy an integral part of the course: the students could take it or leave it, but I venture to think that the great majority would welcome it gladly. Such thinking about education would be thinking to some purpose. I have been able to deal only with certain fundamentals of the training-course. Much more might be said about the curriculum (and particularly about the place to be occupied in it by physical education), but space forbids. Such proposals as I have made would involve a complete reorientation of the whole business of training. The objective would be different; it would be the production of the right type of men and women, rather than of the technical expert : men are men," said John Stuart Mill, "before they are lawyers, or physicians or merchants or manufacturers (we might add or teachers "); "and if you make them capable and sensible men, they will make themselves capable and sensible lawyers or physicians" (or teachers). The curriculum would be different. And the methods would be different. There would have to be much more tutorial work, and fewer lectures. This would mean a larger staff, and the problem already acute, of keeping the staff in touch with the school-world would be proportionately increased. The longer men and women serve on the staff of a training college or training department, the less they know about the schools for which they are preparing their pupils. My own suggestions for dealing with this difficulty are frequent sabbatical terms, to be spent in a school either as a full member of the staff or in the capacity of an observer, and occasional interchanges with members of a school staff: both partners to the arrangement would profit by it.

"

"

There remains the question of when training should be given. It is commonly assumed that this should be before teaching begins. But need this always be so? Apart from

the difficulty of finding time in a course of reasonable length for all that should be included, there is the important consideration that it is only after experience that much training becomes really valuable. It is after some years of teaching that a teacher really knows the questions he wants to ask psychology is no longer an academic study, but has become the practical politics of the class-room: and to be able to return now for a term or a year to the atmosphere of the university, to be able to meet there its philosophers and its historians, its specialists in every subject, and to be able to discuss experiences and methods with teachers similarly returned from every type of school, would be an invaluable and an illuminating experience. What is needed is something like a Staff College in Education. There is no reason why the university departments of education should not offer such facilities to practising teachers now, as the Oxford University Department is prepared to do. But this would only be the first step towards the working out of a fully-organized scheme. The curriculum vitae for a fully qualified teacher that I should

like to see is this: first, a completed secondary-school course then a university course, followed by a year's professional training and the winning of a Preliminary Certificate or Diploma; the course for this would be such as I have outlined above; after this there would be three or four years' teaching experience, during which the student would be a full-time member of a school staff but would still keep in touch with the training department. Finally, he would return for a further course in which his work might take the form of a thesis on some particular aspect of educational practice or theory, and which would be recognized by a Higher Diploma on its successful completion; this Higher Diploma would be an acknowledged passport to the higher posts in the profession, and those who did not aim at these could be content with the Preliminary Diploma. For the fully qualified teacher, the examination for his degree would be the Preliminary, the examination for the First Diploma the Intermediate, and the Examination for the Higher Diploma the Final. Perhaps this is to cry for the moon if so, we must cry till the moon comes down.

(Physical education, you might say, is scarcely the home territory of a young woman who was ostensibly hired to teach French. But in a far-away Highland county, and in a school staffed as an intermediate but run as a secondary, she who is an hireling is expected to do many jobs for her sheep. In this way, she finds herself not only the whole department of French from Class I to Class VI, but half of the department of English as well; she dabbles distractedly in History and Geography; and, since the physical training instructor was called up last year, she has found the letters Girls' P.T." on her already mountainous time-table. She bends, but does not break.)

IT

T was the woebegone faces of my girls which moved me to pity. To be sure, in my stony pedagogical heart there had been too much triumphant joy of late, for, since our village was invaded by a swarm of Indian soldiers and hundreds of mules, we have had to surrender our gymnasium. At the thought of two spare periods in the week, I had rubbed my hands and sung songs under my breath. But, when I had gathered all my girls into the French class-room and seen the happy faces lengthen into masks of despondency, I hied me to the window and looked out at the weather. It was apparently serene, for high above the rusty line of the Ord, dotted with the cloud-like blobs that were sheep, the sun reigned in an unspeakably blue sky. The distant hills of Ross showed in a violet haze on the horizon; black against the sky, atop of a lofty plateau, a crofter was carting peats; the Highland cattle grazing on the hilly pasture just beyond the village roofs were patches of russet-red, and the grass under their hooves was green --faery-green, like the grass of Tir-nan-Og. Between village and school, there stretched before my eyes a broad, uneven expanse of sunny gravel, across which clumped a horse on its way to the smithy; in the centre, a cock and his hens were busily scratching and pecking, while around them scurried a band of pied wagtails and a hopping company of sparrows, all of whom were disputing the remains of lunch-time pieces " with a snow-white flock of gulls. I looked at the sunshine and was deceived, for I went to my cupboard, pulled out a football, and announced :

"

"

It's such a beautiful day that we can have gym. in the playground."

Like a flock of excited starlings my girls followed me to the school porch, where the warm air was full of the smell of peat-bog under the sun. We tramped round the corner of the building, came in full view of the Loch lying below

We choose sides and I kick off. Immediately the ball is pounced upon by a bunch of what I can only describe as hopelessly entangled arms and legs, and for a long time it is not seen again.

From the local drill hall adjoining the playground, an Indian saunters out and solemnly pegs up on the fence an immense pair of khaki trousers; he then places his elbow on the fence, his chin on his elbow, and remains to watch the turmoil.

My girls are out for fun, and if ever there was all-in football, this is it. Alix approaches the ball with the speed of a chamois, aims a flying kick, misses by two feet, and is carried by the zeal of her play into the school cabbagepatch. Chrissie, a diminutive child from the loneliest village in the county, has a more patient technique, for, having chased the ball far out of the reach of other players, she bobs down, steadies it with her hands, takes a run at it, registers a remarkable miss, and sits down in a cloud of dust. Almost helpless with laughter, I blow my whistle and expostulate, but the wind carries my words over the roof of the school, and the advancing horde is off again with the ball.

Down at the far end of the pitch, they are brought up by the furious onrush of the opposing team. There is more dust, a wild waving of arms, and then a hullabaloo which brings five more Indians out of the drill hall to stand openmouthed at the fence.