to deprive the industrial classes of their thinking power by transferring the thinkers to another class, and is likewise responsible for the inferior higher elementary education offered before 1899 as a substitute for a secondary education, and apparently now again to be offered to them. It has long been responsible for the exclusion of a vast class of devoted teachers from the advantages of a secondary and university training. This conception of secondary education is a base half-truth. The distinction between primary and secondary education is a distinction that is inherent in human personality and its growth. The function of primary teaching is preparatory; its object is to familiarise the infant and child mind with facts, and with symbols (such as reading and writing) necessary for the acquisition and appreciation of facts. The function of secondary teaching is to produce mental development; its business is to teach the child to reason about facts, to deduce inferences from the association of facts, to acquire special knowledge in functional relation to all knowledge. In a word, the work of secondary education is to teach a child how to realise his or her personality in its relation to the world. It is the object of a national system of education to provide teaching of this sort for every child in the country. In so far as it fails to do so the system fails. At the present moment it fails to the extent of two million working children who are destroying the economic balance of industry. Behind these myriads are more than four million children pressing towards the same disastrous goal.

The only solution is secondary teaching for all, beginning at the completion of the tenth year. The difficulty that stands in the way is the supply of teachers. The elementary school teachers, while incomparable for their work in the lower-school classes, are admittedly not trained to give secondary education in the higher classes. The fault is not theirs, but that of a system that has deliberately trained a vast army of teachers not to give secondary teaching, while it has allowed the secondary schools to be supplied with teachers not trained at all. But this difficulty will rapidly disappear. The secondary training of all teachers is at last well recognised as a condition precedent to the establishment of any effective system, and it cannot be long before the secondary teaching of all children— the teaching how to think-will be as obvious a necessity.

At present we have the almost ludicrous position that, while the children in the secondary schools between the ages of ten and fourteen are given (despite untrained teachers) true secondary education, the children in the elementary schools between the same ages are given another and an entirely inferior and unproductive class of education. On grounds of educational theory this is, as we have seen, an indefensible position, while in practice the existence of two million untrained children at work, and on the road to become unemployable, shows that it is a disastrous position.

What then are the possibilities of reform? Lugubrious as the actual position is and threatening as are some of the clouds on the horizon-clouds such as the inconceivable proposal to repeal by statute the decision in the Cockerton Case in the interests of a few rural schools; or, the scarcely less disastrous suggestion that the pupil-teachership system, long since condemned root and branch by the Board of Education, should be revived; or, the attitude of so many local authorities towards child labour; or, the fear lest the Government should be lured from educational reform by attempting to deal once more with the real but apparently not very urgent Nonconformist grievances as to religious teaching-despite these clouds the outlook is not without promise. Thanks to the lifelong efforts of men like the late Mr. H. B. Garrod, the teaching profession has at last secured the status of a learned profession, and the Council for the Registration of Teachers is proving that there is no unbridgeable gulf between the primary and the secondary teacher, and that educational theory has a meaning in practice. The only real distinction between teachers is distinction of specialisation, not of class, and the present smooth-working Council will quietly relegate to history' the Higher Elementary 'Teacher,' the pupil teacher, and all other perverters of a high art. Again, our knowledge of educational practice abroadas brought before us by specialists such as Mr. Cloudesley Brereton, whose volume of Studies in Foreign Education' is of peculiar interest and value, and the Vice-Chancellor of Leeds University, who six years ago by editing his famous volumes on Continuation Schools in England and elsewhere showed his foresight and grasp of the coming problem, and by various official publications, including that recently issued on Education in India-makes it possible for us to

adopt with instructed minds all that is good for us of Imperial, Continental, and American practice. Our new recognition of the intimate relationship of economic and educational problems gives reform an urgency that will scarcely be neglected by any government that relies on a democratic vote.

But perhaps the most hopeful signs to-day are the marvellous re-awakening of voluntary effort and the determination to be rid of educational shams. Even within the bureaucratic confines of State education the human element is asserting itself. Powerless as school managers of provided schools are, hedged in at every turn from administrative action, yet they bring into the schools a non-official element and often win with ready sympathy the hearts of the teachers. From among the managers are formed Care and After-Care Committees (in constant consultation with parents and the school doctors and in touch with the organisers of the too rare but invaluable clinics), while the question of meals for children is still in the main a question of voluntary organisation. The managers of non-provided schools have even larger opportunities, which are well used, of influencing the life of the school. To increase the powers of school managers is a minor reform that is greatly needed. It will accentuate the voluntary side of national education; it will relieve education officers of much unnecessary work and save teachers from some of the cruel burdens of official correspondence. The governors of secondary schools have still greater power to make their influence felt by insisting on the employment of trained teachers, by making every possible administrative effort to secure for the children a longer and calmer period of school life, and by assisting the staff to organise the interior life of the school on the great public school traditions. The voluntary efforts of the teachers themselves, both in elementary and secondary schools, whether in respect to games or to work, supplementing school life, are growing and notable elements in national education. The organisation of clubs for former pupils and of school journeys, whether in the holidays or in term time, involves an immense amount of voluntary work, which is cheerfully undertaken and gives reality and life to the schools. Into this particular work the parents throw themselves both with gifts of money and personal influence.

VOL. CCXVIII. NO. CCCCXLV.

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Against these good influences we have to set the very questionable effects of evening schools. The inefficiency of these continuation schools is notorious. In London thirty per cent. of the pupils are 'ineffective.' Before the work begins the children are tired, the teachers are tired; the discipline is bad; home life is ruled out of existence; the reactions on the day schools are deplorable. The Social Service Committee of the Southwark Diocesan Conference, which has recently investigated with considerable care the conditions of continuation education in South London, deplores the injury to home life that results both from the church club and the evening school: The youth who has been 'brought up in a good home makes the most promising ' material for the evening school or church club, and is 'therefore encouraged to neglect his home. On the other 'hand neither evening school nor church club can easily 'control and develop the youth from a bad home, and therefore 'more readily leave him to its evil influences.' The report of the committee insists that 'Continuation education backed 'by the Church should claim the young for half the working day, that it may do its work with some hope of good results 'to the community as a whole as well as to the young.' There is no doubt that the solution of the whole question lies in this direction. If continuation education is to be restricted to day classes then there is possible a reasonable division of the evenings; there will be time then both for home life and for club life, and for the wholesome exercise and discipline provided by the great Brigade and Scout movements that are doing so much for the welfare of children to-day. The danger of these movements is that they tend still further to disintegrate home life, and their weakness is that they are not organically related to the schools and contribute little to that continuity of education up to the age of seventeen which is the necessary minimum of a national system of education. If the Scout and Brigade movements could universally be linked up (as is sometimes the case now) to the school by means of school journeys and of evening training in the many subjects that the schoolmaster and the scoutmaster have in common; if some guarantee could be given for the efficiency of scoutmasters; then we believe that the great voluntary movement introduced by Colonel Smith, Mr. W, M. Gee, General Baden

Powell, and others would have an extraordinary significance in continuation education.

The principle to be dwelt upon with respect to the whole vast problem is this: that all education from the tenth or eleventh year onward to at least the age of seventeen must be, in the sense explained above, secondary education. From the beginning of the eleventh year to at any rate the end of the fourteenth year secondary education must be given in school; from the hour of leaving school to the end of the seventeenth year, the State in conjunction with voluntary agencies must supply secondary education to every child, by the stern application of the half-time principle foreshadowed in the Factory Act of 1802 and introduced with such growing success into the Post Office. Higher elementary teaching is useless for the purpose of giving the child an outfit for life. The child must receive a training that teaches it to think and to develop its individuality. Moreover, the schools will provide facilities, on payment of fees or by means of scholarships, for higher education in the case of those children who are able to stay on and obtain whole-time education for a longer period in preparation for special work or for the university. It is of the greatest importance to make special provision for those children who are able to remain on at school and to take up their life work from the age of sixteen onwards. At present there is almost a fashion to remove a child at fifteen before the secondary training has had time to mould the mind and personality.

What possibility, what hope is there of attaining these things? In truth there ought to be no difficulty in securing them so far as the State itself is concerned, but there is some expense in the extension of school buildings and the provision of more and better paid teachers. The self-denying ordinance that the State has imposed upon itself in the Post Office it can impose upon the great factories of the North. The half-time system for children under fourteen is an evil, because these children are not ready for technical knowledge; the half-time system for children over fifteen years may be admirable since children of that age are fit for technical knowledge if mental development is going on at the same time. But the voluntary half-time system that the Government is apparently prepared to suggest will not be effective: it may