taught in junior forms. The work here can be as fascinating as a crossword puzzle. These and other methods are the commonplaces of the teaching of English. Again the point is, stress on accuracy of expression.

It is a humiliating confession to make, but it is most certainly true that the examiners at the first school examinations could do very much to force our schools to teach English more thoroughly. As it is, only half of the examining bodies test English-apart from essay and précis. If all of them set searching papers in English and let it be known that a very considerable proportion, at least half, of the total marks were assigned to that paper, and that loose English in literature answers would be severely penalized, it would mean in a very few years that as much attention would be paid to expression as is the case in France. Unfortunately, there is little likelihood of this happening; examining bodies stress literature, and in so doing follow the wishes of the schools.

Much of what has been written above applies to spoken as well as to written English. Lack of space is the sole reason for no further comment upon this part of the teaching of English.

Of the teaching of literature up to and including fourth forms there is little to write. There has probably been a greater improvement in method during the last ten years than during the previous half-century. The trouble is that examination requirements but too often condition the teaching in fifth forms, and this is the more regrettable because the fifth form year is the last, and far the most valuable, for so many of our pupils. The charge is sometimes brought against secondary schools that the teaching therein is too academic. It is my opinion that the charge is justified in so far as the literature read during this examination year is concerned.

A few days ago I asked the twenty-eight pupils in a first school examination class to make me private lists of all they had read outside school work during the last twelve months. An analysis of the lists showed that every pupil had read, regularly, the penny Press, including the Sunday papers; only four the better class morning papers. The popular weeklies were of the type of The Humorist and John Bull, a few reading Punch. Nearly every youngster read a hobby" journal such as The Meccano Magazine, The Wireless World, and Photography. All had read many novels, some as many as thirty or forty. The best writers read by 70 to 80 per cent of these pupils were of the class of Edgar Wallace, Wodehouse, Ian Hay, Porter, "Sapper"-a host of inferior novelists were included, but none of a really harmful type. Only a few had read, and liked, Churchill, Stevenson, Dumas, Wells, Conrad, Bennett, and Galsworthy. Contrast the above list with the set books at first school examinations. One examining body for 1927 set Chaucer, Milton, Fielding, and Cobbett, plus a Shakespeare play, and nothing later. Another, for 1928, certainly included Scott, Conrad, Thackeray, and Reade. I chose these at haphazard as samples, not for invidious comparison.

Taking these examinations as a whole the stress is undoubtedly too much on the English classics, too little on contemporary literature: fiction, drama, and essays of the lighter type. Moreover, the gap in intellectual standard between these set books and the reading of the great majority of the candidates when left to their own devices, is far too great for such set books to exercise much influence, still less a lasting influence, at any rate upon such pupils as mine-and I have no reason to think that my class is an exception. No one would suggest that the classics should be neglected. But the stress is on the wrong type of literature. This mistake, the stressing of the wrong type of literature, is often accompanied, unfortunately, by another mistake, a too academic type of question. Take the following examples show by what means Shakespeare brings into You Like It the spirit and tone of the woodland; quote some ten or twelve lines from " Paradise Lost" which seem to you to have great dignity, and attempt to show how this

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effect is attained; The Elizabethan lyric is marked by common-place themes and unfailing vivacity." Illustrate this criticism from the poems of Book I, The Golden Treasury"; What can be learned from Keats' Selections of his own reading? What authors and books did he like best to read?; “In none of our poets, with the sole exception of Shakespeare, do we find so many phrases so happy in their boldness." Give examples of such phrases from Lamia,' Isabella" and "The Eve of St. Agnes." Again, I take these examples at haphazard; I readily agree that more suitable questions are set-but less suitable also. Generally speaking, the questions set are suitable enough for the minority of the candidates. They may not be too difficult even for most of the majority. But they are the wrong type of questions, and to prepare our pupils to face such questions prevents us to a considerable extent from treating even the English classics as they ought to be treated, given the human material upon which we have to work.

Consider the future of our fifth form pupils in Stateaided secondary schools. Only a very small minority go to universities; some enter the learned professions; a much larger number take up clerical work in banks, insurance offices, the offices of various kinds of business firms; yet others enter trade, and some industry. Our aim should be to cultivate in these a taste for as good literature as may be possible. But, at sixteen, it is impossible to inculcate a deep and lasting appreciation of the best in English literature. First school examination syllabuses and papers, however, force us to read for the most part literature which is just too difficult for them, and to read it in what is just not the right way. The result is that we cannot make the best of the best year of the school hours of these pupils. I admit freely that most of our pupils are interested in most of the set books. My own class during the past year liked Pope's "Rape of the Lock," "Henry IV," and Chaucer's 'Prologue"; most of them had a quite natural, though passive, dislike for Macaulay's "Essay on Addison." The fact remains that such books as these are about a year beyond their real capacity. Such books will not, even for that reason alone, persuade them after they have left school to read more of the same authors, though many no doubt will go to see Shakespeare played. On the other hand, there is an abundance of contemporary work: prose, poetry, novel, drama, which would not only have interested them far more because of the appeal to their limited experience of the life of to-day, but would in very many cases have served as a basis from which to raise the standard of their taste in literature.

In a laudable endeavour to give of the best, we grasp the shadow and lose the substance, because the best is beyond the real comprehension of the majority of our pupils of first school examination age. The root of the trouble lies in the difficulty with which the adult is faced when he has to measure the capacity of the adolescent. This is the problem which a teacher has constantly to recognize and solve. Even the oldest and most experienced among us are from time to time brought up sharply by a realization that we are teaching above the heads of our pupils. Sometimes it is the most brilliant among us who fail to realize this, perhaps because of their own brilliancy.

But a university must tend to judge of the whole product of our schools by what we send them-for the most part our best pupils. Naturally, therefore, it is hard to convince a university examining body that it has but an imperfect knowledge of the level of mental capacity and, what is even more important, of the severe limitation imposed by a narrow experience, of the bulk of the candidates whom it examines. Fortunately, the goodwill of these bodies is unquestioned, and they are steadly coming into close touch with the schools. Mutual confidence and a growing understanding of our position should in time remove some of the disabilities inherent in any examination system. Meanwhile, our fifth form pupils must pay the penalty for a fault not theirs.

Dr. Edward Lyttelton said, recently, "Ten years of ordinary school teaching send 80 per cent of our secondary school pupils out into the world with no love of learning

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for its own sake: that is because they have not been allowed to reject what they were not ready for." is right.

HAT secondary schools are suffering from an overcrowded curriculum is a commonplace, but suggestions for remedying the evil are not forthcoming in great numbers. Proposals for adding to the burden are more frequent. Biologists urge that their own subject is as important as any that can engage the attention of educated people, and that it is sadly neglected; the inclusion of hygiene in the time-table is recommended by eminent scientists and medical men; students of Italian want to find a corner for that language; the friends of the drama urge that children ought to do a great deal of acting; and so forth. Nor is it only the number of subjects that tends to increase; subjects themselves have a habit of throwing out branches and developing departments, all of which must be attended to. Arithmetic in elementary schools now includes mental arithmetic, problems, and frequently graphs, as well as ordinary calculation; for French in secondary schools, conversation, dictation, and the reading of poetry as well as prose are demanded. The result in both cases is the same; a general complaint of lack of accuracy and thoroughness. Such a consequence is only what might be expected; if we give teachers and children more to do than can be done thoroughly in the time at their disposal we may be pretty sure that it will not be done thoroughly.

If we are ever to hew a way through the present monstrous jungle of a curriculum there are certain principles which must be frankly accepted and honestly put into practice-accepted and practised with sadness and resignation, maybe, but still accepted and practised. Some of those principles are that boys and girls can learn only a few things thoroughly, that no subject of any difficulty can be studied thoroughly and fruitfully unless a great deal of time is given to it for a very long period, that consequently if children are to get a real grip of even a few things they must grow up in ignorance of an immense number of things of which we should like them to know something, and be incapable of doing many things which we should like them to be able to do. Thus we are driven back upon principles which were once the commonplaces of educational thought and to which we still sometimes do lip-service on platforms-that the object of learning is to learn how to learn, that it is better to learn a little well than a great deal badly, that brains and character are of more importance than knowledge, that the real essence of education is training, mind-forming, intellect-developing, and other ideas of the same kind.

On the other hand we shall have to work in a precisely opposite direction-and whilst we hold firmly that for discipline and mental development it is necessary that some subjects should be studied systematically, fully, and with the eye fixed on a high standard, we shall admit that much good may be done by dealing with others unsystematically, scrappily, if you will, and without any idea of a definite standard being reached. And so, just as a basis for discussion, as readers of papers at educational meetings are so fond of saying, let us suppose the subjects to be learnt at school to be divided into two groups, which for convenience we may call "major" and “minor.” The major subjects would be those on which we should rely for real training and discipline -to them children would give the bulk of their intellectual energies, and by their proficiency in these, they-and the school-would be mainly judged. They should occupy the whole of the morning hours, and should not number more than three at any one period of the school life, except in the highest schools with a leaving age of eighteen plus,

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where four might be admitted. The three or four might vary infinitely in schools and departments of schools. The ideal curriculum for the strongest brains must always be mathematics, experimental science, and either two foreign languages with their literature and some history, or else one foreign language with a full course of history. Yet one can imagine that in some schools mathematics might drop into the second rank and science, languages, literature, and history be held to give an all-sufficing education. History, including various branches of study which grow out of it, is the study of man as a social being; literature is the study of individual minds; science is the study of nature. Between them they represent all the interests of the growing intelligence; they cover the whole ground.

Again in studying experimental science and in learning languages, we are in immediate contact with the phenomena studied, we are acquiring knowledge at first hand; in studying history we learn from books and we acquire knowledge at second-hand. Physics and chemistry again afford the highest degree of certainty that the human mind can reach, except in mathematics, and are built up on a rigid system of reasoning; history offers a much lower degree of certainty, and its deductions and inductions seldom get beyond a high degree of probability. So history and physical science represent the two different methods by which we seek for truth, and two very different degrees of success in attaining it. It might be held, however, in other schools that the three subjects of most fundamental importance were mathematics, experimental science, and language, because for the fruitful cultivation of these subjects a definite training in method of a lengthy and arduous kind is required, and if boys and girls do not get that training at school they will never get it at all, hence they will not be able to study them in later life, otherwise than painfully, inefficiently, and with much muddling and blundering, whereas you can begin to learn history and geography at any time simply by reading books. John Stuart Mill indeed declared that to teach these subjects in schools was a waste of labour, since no one learnt them except by reading. No doubt this is going too far, but it remains true that what we chiefly want for history and geography is the capacity to read, so that teachers who could cultivate that capacity in boys and girls would not need to be greatly distressed if they imparted to them a very small modicum of historical and geographical knowledge.

After all in present circumstances the amount of such knowledge which children assimilate is so very small that it is of little value except that it breaks windows into the mind through which the mind can look in later years. But as no intellectual purpose is served by having windows in the mind if you never look through them, we get back to the original position that what is most needed is the capacity to read. Interest also, a hundred voices will at once add, and quite rightly; but interest and capacity work hand-in-hand, each stimulating the other, and each being the necessary condition of the other. Yet teachers surely ought to fasten their eyes rather upon capacity than interest, for interest is after all usually the gift of the gods, and some people feel interest in what they learnt, or began to learn, at school, whilst others regard school subjects with indifference, or even aversion, simply because they were school subjects. Unfortunately, schools have not yet discovered the secret of cultivating a capacity to read-at least if one may judge from the records of public libraries and from the habits of ordinary

men and women. The extraordinarily small amount of reading which even educated and intelligent people can do, even on subjects in which they are genuinely interested, is a thing to make any impartial observer sceptical about the results of education. What the missing secret is, the present writer does not pretend to know, but it may be suggested that something might be done by making boys and girls learn more by reading and less by listening to the human voice. In elementary schools there is happily a pronounced movement in this direction.

But to get back to the curriculum. The ideal curriculum being obviously impossible except to a few intellectual sons of Anak, what is to be done for ordinary mortals ? Let us, again "as a basis for discussion," divide our heterogeneous collection of subjects into four classes: (1) the great disciplinary subjects, already spoken of; (2) the outlook and information subjects, that is, history and geography; (3) arts and crafts, the object of teaching which is primarily the acquirement of practical skill, and only secondarily the acquirement of knowledge; and (4) the subjects that appeal to the soul and stimulate emotion, of which there are three, religion, poetry, and the apprecia

tion of art.

This classification is obviously not strictly scientific, but it will serve a useful purpose. First, we may put the subjects in class (4) into the minor groups, not because they are of minor importance, but because they demand a comparatively small amount of time. Appeals to the emotions ought not to be very frequent. Certainly we need not give an hour a week to each. Poetry should not, for children under 16 at least, be regarded as a subject of study at all; teachers should treat poetry as the Greek rhapsodists and the medieval ballad-reciters treated it, relying on the direct appeal to heart and ear, avoiding anything which needs elaborate explanation, or which does not spring from universal and primitive emotions, such poems to name three on which the class-room door should be tight shut-as Wordsworth's Daffodils," Keats's "Ode to Autumn," and Gray's "Elegy." The reading of Shakespeare should, except in the highest forms of the most literary schools, be much simplified. No play should be read in its entirety. To plod patiently through all the scenes, including the dullest and the most difficult, taking two or three terms over the process, is the worst way of handling Shakespeare. A better method would be to make a selection of scenes forming a continuous whole, which can be done with every play, and read it through in two or three weeks, giving an hour every afternoon to the reading. Very difficult scenes, such as some in the early part of " Macbeth," should be avoided; if necessary their substance can be given to the children. The suggestion of a new bowdlerized Shakespeare also-one in which not only the improprieties but also the unintelligibilities would be eliminated—is not to be despised, however difficult of execution it may appear. Except in the Shakespeare fortnight, or the Shakespeare month, the plays would be left alone. Here we have the principle of concentration, as against the principle of distraction, which is the keynote of contemporary education, and the question to be considered is whether a greater impression is made upon the mind by an intensive process than by an extensive.

We are left then with the first three classes of subjects, and the first obvious principle would be the selection of one subject from each class, to be treated as a major subject and taught systematically for an hour a day. But we must not forget English, which is not so much a subject as the necessary condition of teaching all other subjects. In many secondary schools, specially those where a large proportion of the children come from elementary schools, English, which includes grammar, analysis, and the study of the language, as well as composition and the reading of good prose, would demand its hour a day for two years probably; after that it might sink into the second rank. If any one

of the three, mathematics, science, and a foreign language were taken-and, generally speaking, one of these three ought to be taken-that would also require its hour a day for four or five years, if it is to be done thoroughly. There would still be room for one major subject in the first biennial period and two major subjects in the second. One of these would certainly be a craft, and if a year in a girls' school were found enough for housecraft (cooking and needlework), then drawing might also have a year. History might follow geography, or vice versa, or one of these subjects might be taken as a major subject throughout the course, so much of the other being taught as is naturally connected with it.

Of subjects not in the major list, so much would be taught as was found possible. Mathematics would mean elementary arithmetic, science a mere initiation into the experimental method, and foreign language a reading knowledge only. The value of the last, it must be admitted, is dubious, and probably few teachers would wish to revive two hours a week French or German.

With history as a minor subject on the other hand, something more substantial could be done. History in fact, which lends itself to endless variety of treatment, affords the best example of what would be the difference between a subject learnt on a large scale and the same subject learnt on a small scale. History taught for six hours a week for three or four years might include, in addition to the story of this island, the stories of Ireland, India, and the United States, now almost completely neglected, with consequent general ignorance of those countries, so important to us; a general view of the history of Europe, with more particular treatment of the three fundamental movements which have made modern Europe, namely the Renaissance, including geographical and scientific discovery, the Reformation, and the French Revolution; and even possibly some elements of economics and politics. It would, of course, include a good deal of geography, and that the kind of geography which for the practical purposes of life is best worth knowing. History for two hours a week for two years could be little more than gaining an acquaintance, mostly by reading, of some of the salient events and movements of our own story. Yet this might be enough to make a child realize a few fundamental truths, such as the facts that our institutions are deep-rooted in the past and have grown to be what they are by slow degrees; that the present industrial organization of society is not the only conceivable organization; that war, once the natural condition of mankind, is a gradually diminishing factor in human affairs, though no one can be certain that it will ever disappear entirely, and so forth.

A last word on examinations. The present writer is a firm believer in the value of examinations as supplying a definite objective and a definite standard at which schools can aim, furnishing a strong stimulus to hard, continued effort, and preventing desultoriness, indeterminateness, and general sloppiness. Their importance in these directions can hardly be exaggerated. On the other hand no one surely can suppose that no good teaching is possible unless there is an examination in view, and that there can be no useful knowledge except examinable knowledge. Let schools therefore offer for examination only the subjects which are taught as major subjects during not less than two years preceding the examination. All subjects must be admitted to the examination room on equal terms. No doubt it is difficult to examine in cookery, but we may trust feminine ingenuity to find a method. As for equivalence, it is a vain dream. Nature knows nothing of equivalence. You cannot reduce the minds of a scholar, an engineer, and a statesman to a common denominator, and assess their values numerically. Just as little can you evaluate the minds of their youthful embryos. To divide the whole youth of the country at sixteen in two classes, (Continued on page 497)

one of which shows a certain level of mental ability, and the other fails to do so is beyond the wit of examiners. All they can do, is to discover whether the candidates have reached a certain standard of attainment in certain schoollearnt subjects. The subjects in which a candidate is

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up to par should be stated on his certificate, and we must leave it to those who read the certificate to judge that a girl who has passed in botany, cookery, and geography, is not of the same intellectual calibre as one who has got credit in mathematics, experimental science, and German.

OWARDS the end of last century, when physical science seemed to some of its votaries to have settled into a groove, suddenly there was an astounding outburst of discovery. The X-rays, radio-activity, the electronthese followed one another in bewildering succession; discoveries wholly unexpected and pregnant with uses to mankind. Each in turn was a revelation to the philosopher; it gave a fresh direction to his concepts of Nature, and it enriched him with novel methods of research. Each of these discoveries also offered an untrodden avenue of practical application.

About 1895 Sir J. J. Thomson, examining the discharge which proceeds from the cathode or negative pole of a Crookes' vacuum tube, established the fact that it consists of a stream of separate particles-corpuscles he called them of negative electricity, independent and all absolutely alike. These corpuscles are now called electrons ; normally, in the absence of electrical disturbance they make up, as it were, the crinoline or fender of a material atom; but when streaming from the cathode they have escaped from domestic ties. Each electron is a definite quantity of disembodied electricity-an irreducible unitdelightfully free to respond to any electric force, for its inertia is barely the eighteen-hundredth part of that of the lightest atom of ordinary matter.

Free electrons are known to be given out by highly heated substances, such as the glowing filament in the vacuum bulb of an electric lamp. This fact was turned to account by Fleming in an invention which one may, with no exaggeration, call epoch-making. He was in search of a sensitive detector of wireless signals, a detector more sensitive than the types Marconi originally employed. When a telegraphic signal sent by wireless strikes the receiving aerial it sets up a group of electrical oscillations, where crests and hollows alternate in very rapid succession -many thousands of times per second. To get them to make a signal which will be heard on a telephone or shown by a galvanometer, you must rectify the group, cutting out the hollows, one may say, and leaving only the crests. Fleming, in 1905, had the happy inspiration to employ the electrons which are given off by the hot filament in a vacuum bulb as agents in the work of rectification. For this purpose he fitted the bulb with a second conductor, now called the plate or anode, to which the stream of electrons from the hot filament may pass. He connected the bulb with the receiving aerial in such a manner that oscillations due to the wireless signal endeavoured to bridge the gap between filament and plate. When this is done, the crests as we may call those parts of the oscillating current which flow with the stream of electrons-pass easily; but the hollows, which are the parts that try to flow the opposite way, are stopped. Thus the device acts as a rectifier of the received oscillations, keeping the crests but cutting out the hollows, and for that reason the inventor very appropriately called it a valve-a thing that allows passage only one way.

The Fleming thermionic valve soon came into use as a sensitive detector of wireless signals. Two years or so later its capabilities were much extended by the American electrician Lee de Forest, who introduced a third conductor in the form of a grid through which the stream of electrons passed on their way from the filament to the plate. With

Extracted from the James Forrest Lecture on "A Century of Inventions" delivered before the Institution of Civil Engineers on June 5, by Sir Alfred Ewing, K.C.B., F.R.S., Vice-Chancellor and Principal of the University of Edinburgh.

this addition the device, now called a triode valve, could be applied as a powerful relay or amplifier, receiving any electrical oscillations and passing them on, greatly magnified. It is arranged that the incoming oscillations shall cause small variations in the potential of the grid; these produce large and sensibly proportional changes in the electron stream which passes to the place.

The triode valve is the essential instrument of modern wireless; it serves not only to rectify and magnify the received signals, but also, at the sending end, to create the oscillations which are radiated into space. Thus, from the great station at Rugby, a group of mammoth triode valves converts hundreds of horse-power into high-frequency electrical oscillations which carry signals and speech to America. And even this is not the end of the wonderful story, for the triode valve also acts as what is called a modulator, impressing upon the high-frequency waves which constitute wireless radiation the fluctuations of amplitude which enable them to serve as carriers of speech or of music, so that they may thereby convey the relatively slow vibrations of quite another sort which make up sound. Further, in telephoning over wires, the triode valve forms an admirably effective relay, acting, at a succession of points along the line, to restore the energy of the transmitted sound without injury to its quality. Moreover, by using suitable "filtered" bands of carrier currents, a number of entirely independent conversations can take place simultaneously over the same wire, while it serves also as channel for a multiple group of telegraphic messages. All these wonders are made possible by the triode valve. Its technical applications appear to have no bounds. It is also an instrument of research; it can be made to generate vibrations of unexampled frequency, and in the hands of physiologists and others it measures the slightest and most fugitive of electrical effects.

If progress is tested by the conquest of inanimate Nature, then the century now closing finds no parallel in the past. It may be likened to the efflorescence of a plant which for long has been quietly growing to maturity and suddenly bursts into flower. We have witnessed as it were the change from bud to blossom. What is to follow? What is left for the future engineer to do? Can the recent astounding pace of discovery and invention be maintained ? Or does a time approach when engineers will sit down like so many Alexanders to lament a too-completely conquered world of mechanical things, just as a time comes to geographers when there are no more regions to explore? To me it seems likely that there will be something of a lull in the revolutionary fervour of the engineer. Social changesdrastic social changes-may be looked for, but not, I think, so directly consequent on his activities as in the century now ending. Mechanical devices will, of course, be increasingly used, but probably they will become standardized and taken for granted, like the watches we carry. We cannot be surprised if we find interest in them slacken. Improvements will be made, but they will attract little notice, for the things they affect will already be commonplaces of life. It may very well happen that the mental energy of mankind, now flowing so strongly in this channel of ours, will seek and find outlets in other directions. While as engineers we may regret such an issue, we cannot but admit that it may prove beneficial to the human race, since, beyond question, there is grave need for progress of quite a different kind.