698 TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION L. 
years in nationalising our education has been very rapid. It may be that it has 
been too rapid, that sufficient thought has not been given to the altered social 
and industrial conditions which have to be considered. We have witnessed a 
strong desire and a successful effort to multiply Secondary and Technical Schools 
and to open more widely the portals of our Universities. The object of the desire 
is good in itself. As the people grow in knowledge the demand tor higher educa- 
tion will increase; but the serious question to be considered is whether the kind 
of education which was supplied in schools, founded centuries ago to meet 
requirements very different from our own, is equally well adapted to the con- 
ditions which have arisen in a state of society having other needs and new 
ideals. Very rightly our students in training for the profession of teachers 
are expected to study the writings of Locke, Rousseau, Milton, Montaigne, and 
others ; but many are apt to overlook the fact that these writers had in view a 
different kind of education from that in which modern teachers are engaged, and 
that their suggestions, excellent as many of them are, were mainly applicable to 
the instruction to be given by a tutor to his private pupil, and had little or no 
reference to the teaching of the children of the people in schools expressly 
organised for the education of the many. Only recently have we come to realise 
that a democratic system of education, a system intended to provide an intellectual 
and moral training for all citizens of the State, and so organised that, apart from 
any consideration of social position or pecuniary means, it affords facilities for 
the full development of capacity and skill wherever they may occur, must be 
essentially different in its aims and methods from that under which many of us 
now living have been trained. It has also been brought home to us that the 
marvellous changes in our environment, in the conditions under which we live and 
work, whether in the field, the factory, or the office, have necessitated corresponding 
changes in the education to be provided as a preparation for the several different 
pursuits in which the people generally are occupied. Yet, notwithstanding these 
great forces which have broken in upon and disturbed our former ideals, forces the 
strength and far-reaching effects of which we readily admit, we still hesitate to 
face the newly arisen circumstances and to adapt our educational work to its vastly 
extended area of operation and to the altered conditions and requirements of 
modern life. 
When I say we hesitate to face the existing circumstances I do not wish to be 
misunderstood. Asa fact changes are continually being discussed, and are from 
time to time introduced into our schools. But such modifications of our existing 
methods are generally isolated and detached, and have little reference to the more 
comprehensive measures of reform which are now needed to bring our teaching into 
closer relation with the changed conditions of existence consequent on the altera- 
tions that have taken place in our social life and surroundings. 
Four years ago, it will be remembered, a committee of this section was 
appointed to consider and to report upon the ‘Courses of Experimental, Observa- 
tional, and Practical Studies most suitable for Elementary Schools.’ That com- 
mittee, of which I had the honour to be chairman, presented a report to this 
section at the meeting of the Association held last year at York. The general 
conclusion at which they arrived was that ‘the intellectual and moral training, and 
indeed to some extent the physical training, of boys and girls between the ages 
of seven and fourteen would be greatly improved if active and constructive work 
on the part of the children were largely substituted for ordinary class teaching, 
and if much of the present instruction were made to arise incidentally out of, 
and to be centred around, such work.’ It is too early, perhaps, to expect that 
the suggestions made in that report should have borne fruit, but I refer to it 
because it illustrates the difference between the spasmodic reforms which from 
time to time are adopted, under pressure from bodies of well-meaning representa- 
tives of special interests, and the well-considered changes recommended by a com- 
mittee of men and women of educational experience who have carefully tested the 
conclusions at which they have arrived. 
There can be no doubt that, as regards our elementary education, there is very 
general dissatisfaction with its results, since it was first nationalised thirty-seven 
