EDUCATION AND THE WAR 



"Agricultural and vocational training is the big topic in educational 

 circles to-day. 1 ' 



A REVOLUTION NECESSARY IN EDUCATION 



"If we are to face the future with any confidence after this exhausting war, we must 

 face it as an educated people. We shall not be able to afford to waste the efficiency of a 

 single English child. On all sides we hear the cry, though we see little enough of the 

 practice, for economy. Now economy means one or both of *v;o things — less expense, 

 greater production. It is said by materialistic economists that lack of capital will 

 render greater productiveness impossible. They iorget the only capital that has 

 permanent significance — the men and women of the nation. Our national business is 

 to eliminate waste in human beings and to make each human being capable of realizing 

 to the full his or her potential capacity for creative work, whether such work be material 

 or moral or spiritual. Those ends can only be reached by the best training of childhood 

 in the homes and in the schools. Something, of course, can be done among adults; 

 but in the aggregate it is, comparatively speaking, very little. The bulk of humanity 

 is made or marred in youth. Now there is no more appalling fact in our national 

 economy than the waste of that supreme national product — the child. We do not refer 

 particularly to the waste of infant life, for that is merely one of many by-products of 

 ignorance. We refer to the waste of efficiency among the children who survive. Con- 

 sider the children of the people, how they live, after the experience of half a century of 

 compulsory primary education. There are nearly half a million children between the 

 ages of twelve and fourteen years who are receiving no education, or no education worth 

 having. Some of these are at school, but all are at work, work leading no- whither, at the 

 very age when moral and physical development are at stake. In addition to these there 

 are at least a million and a half of children between the ages of fourteen and seventeen 

 years who are receiving in the week no school education of any kind. The Consultative 

 Committee in its report of 1909 asserted that 'at the most critical period in their lives 

 a very large majority of the boys and girls in England and Wales are left without any 

 sufficient guidance and care. . This neglect results in great waste of early promise, an 

 injury to character, in the lessening of industrial efficiency, and in the lowering of ideals 

 of personal and civic duty'." — "The Weekly Times, London, Eng." 



A CREED FOR COUNTRY BOYS AND GIRLS 



G. C. CREELMAN/B.S.A., LL.D., President Ontario Agricultural College 



The Boy's Creed 



1. I believe that life in the Country can be made just as pleasant and profitable as 

 life in the City. 



2. I believe that father and I can form a partnership that will suit both of us. 



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