TEE STORY OF ENGLISH EDUCATION. 349 



tribiited to the County Councils throughout the country for the purpose 

 of encouraging teclmical education. This money was and is awarded 

 to the secondary schools by way of grants in recognition of successful 

 results achieved by the school in technical education. These grants 

 have proved so necessary to the various secondary schools that such 

 schools have been compelled to start an eihcient system of technical 

 education in order to earn them. In this respect competition with the 

 primary schools has done good. It has forced the secondary schools 

 to find a new source of income beyond endowment and fees and has thus 

 brought the ancient secondary or grammar school system of England 

 into relationship with the state. The state has not been slow to recog- 

 nize the relationship. In addition to. the technical education grants it 

 now makes special grants to all secondary schools that are prepared to 

 attain a certain standard of efficiency in certain subjects — scientific 

 and literary — named by the Board of Education. It is not, however, 

 difficult to see how confused and conflicting was the whole system. 

 It was in fact gradually becoming • impossible to differentiate be- 

 tween primary, higher elementary and secondary education. The 

 Cockerton case at last, by restricting the board schools to strictly 

 elementary education, made it necessary for the legislature to review 

 the whole position. It was evident that the CocTcerton case could not 

 be allowed to lower the standard of national education; it was 

 equally evident that a glorified school board system meant the ulti- 

 mate ruin of all forms of tertiary or university education so far as 

 the masses were concerned. These aspects of the problem were ob- 

 vious to all who were not blinded by hatred to the established church 

 into refusing aid to the voluntary schools, or who were not members 

 of school boards and believers in the eternal fitness of a higher ele- 

 mentary cul de sac training. 



In order to place national education upon a sound basis it was 

 necessary that every possible grade of education from the infant classes 

 of elementary schools to the post-graduate classes of the universities 

 should form one continuous system, and that there should be no com- 

 petitive overlapping between its various parts. It was also necessary 

 that the system should in no way run contrary to the almost universal 

 national belief that christian religious teaching in some form or an- 

 other, denominational or undenominational, must take a definite place 

 in the education of children. The Board of Education act, 1899, to 

 some extent paved the way for the elaborate national system that is 

 now, under the act of 1902, in a fair way to become effective. The act 

 of 1899 established a board of education to take the place both of the 

 education committee of the Privy Council (knovni as the Education 

 Department) and the South Kensington Department of Science and 

 Art. It gave to this new board the power to inspect all secondary 



