Mr. Macan's Address 297 



in the earlier stages of a child's career, has had to be 

 touched with some difficulty. 



Secondly, the County Councils had no locus standi 

 which enabled them to get into close touch with the 

 primary teacher. Not that the teachers were at all 

 unwilling; on the contrary, no praise is too great for 

 those who voluntarily gave up their little leisure week 

 by week and year by year to qualify for the great 

 work of the future. But no facilities to teachers, no 

 aid to councils, came from the village school boards 

 or from many of the village voluntary managers; 

 wiser in their generation than the children of light, 

 these bodies saw that, once the County Councils got a 

 foothold in their schools and a place in the esteem of 

 these teachers, their own doom could not be far off. 



Thirdly, the same causes prevented the teachers 

 seeing the fruits of their labours and securing that 

 employment in the villages for which they had 

 qualified themselves. No one who has not been 

 through it, knows the heart-breaking work of the last 

 ten years to overcome the dead weight of sullen opposi- 

 tion from those assorted groups of petty local obscurant- 

 ists who have hitherto masqueraded as educational 

 authorities. It is a popular superstition that educa- 

 tion is demanded from below, that the great voice of 

 the people in towns or villages cry out for the evening- 

 classes, and the public authorities, thinking only of the 

 rates, repress this yearning. As some one at a trades- 

 union conference put it some few months ago, the 

 persons who should direct education, and of course 

 control the teachers, are those who, having had none 

 themselves, have keen aspirations (not aspirates, be it 

 noted) for it to be given to others. As regards the 



