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1. Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education on the Education of the Adolescent. 1926.

2. The Folk High Schools of Denmark and the Development of a Farming Community. By H. BEGTRUP, H. LUND, and P. MANNICHE. Oxford University Press. 1926.

3. Spiritual Values in Adult Education.

University Press.

2 Vols.

1925.

By B. A. YRAXLER.

Oxford

4. The Handbook and Directory of Adult Education, 1926-1927. H. F. W. Deane & Sons.

5. The Way Out: Essays on the Meaning and Purpose of Adult Education. Edited by Hon. OLIVER STANLEY. Oxford University Press. 1923.

6. An Adventure in Working Class Education.

Longmans. 1920.

By ALBERT MANSBRIDGE.

7. Our Public Elementary Schools. By Sir MICHAEL SADLER. Thornton Butterworth.

THERE

1926.

HERE is some risk that we may treat education as St. Paul was treated by the natives at Malta, who began by supposing him to be a criminal and then changed their minds and said that he was a god. So, after centuries of neglect, men are inclined to treat education as a fetish. We begin to think it omnipotent. Give education and all will be well. That is a common cry of educational congresses and of all who are or wish to appearfriends of education. But it is not true. Education may have a result, and it may have none. Much education has been given, and is being given, which is almost without effect. Mere going to school need not be efficacious any more than mere attending church. It is easy to receive education and remain uneducated. And we need to realise far more the extent of our failures and

VOL. 246. NO. 501.

All rights reserved.

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think far harder about their cause and cure. It is satisfactory to see that there is a growing discontent with our results. But, unfortunately, this discontent is chiefly seen among the natural enemies of education. It is the friends of education who should feel it; for they alone have the power to remove its causes. This article utters some discontents and suggests a cure.

Sir Michael Sadler estimates the cost of elementary education in Great Britain in 1925 at over seventy-two million pounds.* And yet what proportion of our adult population can be said to be educated? How many have any intellectual interests? How many read solid books? How many read any books at all? The fortunes of the British Empire are largely in the hands of the electors of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. What proportion of them bring to the polling-booths knowledge or political intelligence adequate to their responsibilities?

An English officer in Italy during the war, having to give an instruction course to his men, set as a preliminary test a general paper in which occurred the question: "What do you know of any of the following persons?" The persons in the question are here set out in the order indicating which of them were most familiar to the candidates, and the figures after each name show the number of candidates who identified each person: Charles Peace 19, George Stephenson 16, Von Tirpitz 15, Nat Gould 14, C. B. Fry 11, Sir H. Plumer 9, Woodrow Wilson 8, Clemenceau 7, Michael Angelo 6, Sir R. Borden 6, Milton 4, Havelock Wilson 4, Lord Milner 2, Sir Henry Havelock 1.

There are several striking features in the result. Nineteen men had heard of Charles Peace to two who had heard of Lord Milner. Though the paper was set in the summer of 1918, when names like Wilson and Clemenceau were on everyone's lips, there is a surprising ignorance of statesmen who played a decisive part in the war. Even the name of their own army commander, Sir Henry Plumer (as he then was), was unfamiliar to his men. Yet, as the unexpected knowledge of Michael Angelo shows, they were quite capable of " high-brow "interests. Six, at any rate, of the men had during the months spent in Italy learnt something of a great Italian.

But the most interesting point for our purposes is the light thrown on the results of our elementary education. Presumably

"Our Public Elementary Schools," p. 7.

the majority of these candidates had been to school since 1890, that is, during a period when elementary education was in full and effective working. But it was not from school that they had got their education, but from the cheap press. Their reading was in its sporting news, its law court reports. Their politics was learnt from its headlines, whose perspectives are not less amazing than those of a quattrocento artist. This was the literature for which education had given them a taste. This was the intellectual interest which it had left with them. These men had all been educated and, since a British regiment in 1918 was a fair sample of the men of the nation, may be regarded as average products of the elementary school. The result hardly seems adequate to our expenditure on elementary education.

Another way of estimating the amount of intellectual interest among the working classes of the country is by studying the membership of the chief agencies which provide liberal adult education. Of these the largest are: the Workers' Educational Association, which makes an honest, serious and thorough attempt to solve a difficult problem; the National Council of Labour Colleges, which muddies the waters of free inquiry with propaganda; and the Union of National Adult Schools, which, as a whole, are far less systematic and thorough in their educational methods than the two first. The adult enrolment in these three bodies for 1924-5 was respectively 31,249, 27,071 and 51,917. The total number-somewhat smaller than the crowd which year by year watches the final of the cup-tie-is not a large percentage in a population of some forty-three millions. Nor would it be greatly increased if the members enrolled by other agencies of adult education were added to it. Again, the result seems hardly adequate to our expenditure on elementary education.

It is, at any rate, satisfactory that at last we have publicly recognised the cause of these disquieting symptoms. It is not the elementary school that is to blame. Its classes may be overbig, its time-table overfull, its teachers, like all human beings, fallible. But there is no reason to think that the elementary school does its work more imperfectly than secondary schools or universities do theirs. No doubt there is room for improvement. But the business of the elementary school is simply to teach the elements, the alphabet of education, to equip its pupils for learning to read in the great book of nature and life, and to set their feet

on the first rungs of the ladder of education. Its "failure" is that we absurdly expected it to do more, and forgot that learning the alphabet is not learning to read, and that an education which ends at 14 is as far from its goal as a road from London to Brighton which ends at East Croydon. Some few whose education closes with the elementary school may learn what intellectual interest is; some, still fewer, may keep the flame alive in adult life. But for the majority the popular newspapers will be literature, and Nat Gould and Charles Peace, or their successors, the chief personalities in the world. It is something, after fifty years of organized national education, to have discovered that it suffers from a fatal defect. A sign of this discovery is the recent Report of the Consultative Committee of the Board of Education on the Education of the Adolescent.

It appears from this report, that " approximately half the children in the country between 14 and 15, and approximately three-quarters of the children between 15 and 16, are not receiving full-time education of any kind " (p. 52). These facts defined the problem of the committee.

At the present day the years between 11 and 14-15 form the opening phase of secondary education for a small minority of children, and the closing phase of elementary education for the great majority. Is it possible so to organize education that the first stage may lead naturally and generally to the second; to ensure that all normal children may pursue some kind of post-primary course for a period of not less than three, and preferably four, years from the age of 11; and to devise curricula calculated to develop more fully than is always the case at present the powers, not merely of children of exceptional capacity, but of the great mass of boys and girls, whose character and intelligence will determine the quality of national life during the coming quarter of a century? (p. 36.)

To meet this problem the Report makes several recommendations. It urges that :

Primary education should be regarded as ending at about the age of 11. A second stage should then begin, and this stage, which for many pupils would end at 16, for some at 18 or 19, but for the majority at 14 or 15, should, as far as possible, be regarded as a single whole, within which there will be a variety of types of education (p. 173).

The schools are to be of different types, including the present secondary and central schools. Some of them during the last two years of education are to have a "practical" bias and to

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